https://politico.com/news/republicans-abortion-kate-cox
Republicans keep trying to come up with a coherent message on abortion. And real life keeps intruding.
On the campaign trail this week, Nikki Haley was pressed — yet again — to say whether she’d sign a national abortion ban into law. She dismissed the prospect of such a ban as an effort to “scare people” and jostled with Chris Christie over who had the more reasonable position on abortion.
As the two traded shots, though, they were upstaged by events far away from New Hampshire.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an ally of former President Donald Trump, drew national attention for blocking Kate Cox, whose fetus had a terminal condition, from having an abortion. And then, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court decided to take up a case that could affect access to mifepristone — a ruling that could get in the way of GOP efforts to sound reasonable on the issue.
The contrast between the GOP candidates’ maneuvering toward the middle and the real-world events that remind the public of the party’s most aggressively anti-abortion faction shows how vexing the issue remains for the party. Eighteen months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, even Republicans who try to moderate — or, like Donald Trump, try not to talk about it — are struggling mightily to get on the right side of popular opinion.
“We have to humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion,” Haley told reporters at Tuesday’s New Hampshire town hall when asked about the Texas case.
The conversation around abortion rights has remained front and center since the Supreme Court overturned Roe last year — from Republicans’ ongoing debate about a national abortion ban to off-year elections reemphasizing the salience of abortion rights for voters.
Republicans continue struggling to find a position they can sell to both their base and the general public, a point that Christie stressed at a New Hampshire town hall on Wednesday: “The voters in this state have a right to know where [Haley] stands, not just her happy talk,” he said. “She wants to be everything to everybody on that issue.”
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