Donald Trump has issued a short response to pro-life Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Trump says Cruz’s recent television ad saying Trump “can’t be trusted” on abortion issues is off base. Trump says he is pro-life and has been for a long time.
Cruz is out this week with a new campaign commercial slamming businessman Donald Trump, who is running as a pro-life candidate, on abortion. With Planned Parenthood funding and a future Supreme Court nomination battle in mind, Cruz says voters “can’t trust” Trump on those key pro-life issues.
In a new television ad entitled “Supreme Trust,” a narrator lists issues that have come before the Supreme Court.
“Life, marriage, religious liberty, the Second Amendment. We’re just one Supreme Court justice away from losing them it all,” the Cruz ad says.
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The ad then goes to footage from a Trump interview in 1999 where Trump says “I’m very pro-choice” but that comment came over a decade before Trump had a change of heart on abortion and became pro-life.
“We cannot trust Donald Trump with these serious decisions,” the Cruz ad concludes.
Trump says he tales exception to the ad.
“Despite Senator Ted Cruz attempting to smear me and totally lie about my beliefs and positions on almost all of the issues, I am a conservative person and I believe in conservative values. Like Ronald Reagan, on many issues, I have evolved. I am pro-life and have been for a long time,” Trump said.
Trump then pointed to a January op-ed he wrote about pro-life issues and where he stands.
Trump opens the column explaining that he is pro-life with exceptions only for the very rarest abortions.
“Let me be clear — I am pro-life. I support that position with exceptions allowed for rape, incest or the life of the mother being at risk,” he said. “I did not always hold this position, but I had a significant personal experience that brought the precious gift of life into perspective for me.”
Trump said America has gone astray because it has moved away from the founding principles the nation’s founders put in most — most notably the right to life.
America, when it is at its best, follows a set of rules that have worked since our Founding. One of those rules is that we, as Americans, revere life and have done so since our Founders made it the first, and most important, of our “unalienable” rights.
Over time, our culture of life in this country has started sliding toward a culture of death. Perhaps the most significant piece of evidence to support this assertion is that since Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Count 43 years ago, over 50 million Americans never had the chance to enjoy the opportunities offered by this country. They never had the chance to become doctors, musicians, farmers, teachers, husbands, fathers, sons or daughters. They never had the chance to enrich the culture of this nation or to bring their skills, lives, loves or passions into the fabric of this country. They are missing, and they are missed.
In February 2011, when questioned about his position, Trump responded by saying the public “would be surprised” by his stance and, in an interview with Laura Ingraham from Fox News leading up to the conference, Trump characterized himself as “pro-life.” Then, Trump explained his conversion at the April 2011 CPAC conference in an interview.
Since his conversion, Trump doesn’t appear to have promoted abortion and continues to say he is pro-life and opposed to funding the Planned Parenthood abortion business. But, last week, when asked on the campaign trail to provide more specifics about the kind of abortion policies he would implement as president, he declined to give any specifics.
Instead, he repeated what he has say countless times before that he is pro-life on abortion but without providing any further details about what he would do on a myriad of pro-life issues he will face as president — most notably naming judges to the Supreme Court who will determine the abortion policy for the nation for decades to come.
The lack of specifics has already caused a group of leading pro-life women to encourage pro-life voters not to vote for Trump.
