Ivanka Trump Says She Is ‘Unapologetically’ Pro-Life

Ivanka Trump Says She Is ‘Unapologetically’ Pro-Life
Ivanka Trump speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, on Aug. 27, 2020. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
Janita Kan
10/30/2020
Updated:
10/30/2020

Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser to the president, has publicly revealed for the first time her stance on abortion, saying that she “unapologetically” supports the pro-life movement.

“I respect all sides of a very personal and sensitive discussion,” Ivanka Trump said in an interview with RealClearPolitics. “But I am also a mother of three children, and parenthood affected me in a profound way in terms of how I think about these things.”

“I am pro-life, and unapologetically so,” she said.

A White House aide later clarified the context of Trump’s answer, saying that it was the first daughter’s personal belief but also her reaction to how far Democrats had shifted their position on the issue.

“A huge driving part of that is where the Democratic Party has gone,” the aide told the publication.

This comes years after speculation over Trump’s stance on abortion after Politico reported in 2017 that Trump had a secret meeting with the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards.

The first daughter’s stance on the unborn mirrors her father’s. President Donald Trump has vocally expressed his support for the pro-life movement and became the first president to attend the March for Life rally early this year.

The Trump administration has also taken a number of steps to protect the unborn such as reinstating the Mexico City policy, which blocks foreign aid to non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortion as a form of family planning, and reinterpreting the rules for Title X so that it “prohibits the use of Title X funds to perform, promote, refer for, or support abortion as a method of family planning.”

The issue of abortion has garnered significant debate in America and has been polarized since the Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, which in 1973 legalized the procedure in all 50 states. A Gallup poll from June found that 48 percent of Americans call themselves pro-choice, while 46 percent say they are pro-life.

The results have been fundamentally consistent for the past decade where an average of 47 percent of Americans say they support abortion rights, meanwhile another 47 percent say they do not.

Democrats and progressives worry that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court bench could eventually overturn Roe v. Wade. Many Democrats and activists were aggressively opposed to then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to fill the vacancy on the bench, because of her judicial philosophy and Catholic faith. When working as an academic at Notre Dame law school, Barrett had signed on to several advertisements that expressed support for the unborn.

Petr Svab contributed to this report.