By WILL WEISSERT and MICHELLE L. PRICE
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Mike Pence used a Friday gathering of some of the nation’s leading Christian conservatives to urge his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination to support a 15-week federal abortion ban at minimum.
The exhortation at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual conference, coming a day before the first anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, amounted to a challenge for the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, who has been reluctant to endorse a federal abortion ban. The former president is set to address the evangelical assembly on Saturday night.
“We must not rest and we must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in this country,” Pence said. “Every Republican candidate for president should support a ban on abortion before 15 weeks as a minimum nationwide standard.”
Pence was among a number of 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina — to speak Friday to the roughly 500 attendees. All of the candidates emphasized their anti-abortion credentials while urging like-minded activists to stay on the political offensive.
DeSantis, who signed a law in Florida banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, touted the measure with a nod toward Trump’s veiled criticism last month that it is “too harsh.”
“It was the right thing to do,” DeSantis told the crowd. “Don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t.”
DeSantis has been less clear on where he stands on a federal abortion ban.
Not far from the conference site in Washington, President Joe Biden was rallying Friday with abortion rights supporters to mark the anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. That ruling, issued June 24, 2022, ended federal constitutional abortion protections and paved the way for near-total bans in…
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