Mike Pence Is Obsessed With Abortion

Fresh off being named Forced-Birth Prom King, our former Vice President Mike Pence has some more thoughts to share about abortion.

In a Wednesday interview with RealClearPolitics, the former vice president all but acknowledged widespread unpopularity of abortion bans and said enacting a national abortion ban is still “profoundly more important than any short-term politics.” It’s about as close to saying “fuck the midterms, let’s ban abortion!!” that a man who refers to his wife as “Mother” is going to get.

“I welcome any and all efforts to advance the cause of life in state capitals or in the nation’s capital,” Pence, who was the first vice president in history to address the March for Life in person in 2017, told the outlet. “And I have every confidence that the next Republican president, whoever that may be, will stand for the right to life.” (Pence, mind you, is widely expected to announce a 2024 run for president, and I have a feeling I know what the centerpiece of his platform will be!)

“However long I have left in the public debate, or on this earth,” Pence mused, “I’m going to be a part of advancing the cause of life all across this nation.”

Pence’s comments come as top Congressional Republicans appear to be in disarray over whether they should pursue a national abortion ban, which Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) proposed this week, despite the well-documented unpopularity of forcing people to give birth. Polling about voters’ reactions to the fall of Roe v. Wade has thus far been devastating for Republicans, to the point that several candidates have been scrubbing mention of the issue from their websites and avoiding talking about it at all costs. We all saw what happened in Kansas!

It’s no wonder Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters on Tuesday, after Graham introduced his 15-week ban, “Most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level.” Republicans in disarray!

As other white men in his party try to calibrate their abortion message based on extremely negative feedback, Pence remains singularly, almost comically focused on abortion, as he always has done. As governor of Indiana, Pence quite literally defunded Planned Parenthood in the state, resulting in a widespread HIV outbreak, because Planned Parenthood clinics were the only providers offering HIV testing in some rural communities.

Among a number of anti-abortion bills Pence signed as governor, one required people to bury or cremate their aborted fetuses. The law sparked “Periods for Pence”—a social media campaign that encouraged menstruating people across the state to bombard Pence’s office with updates, information, and even photos of their periods; the founder of Periods for Pence said in 2016 that the campaign was meant to raise awareness that “fertilized eggs can be expelled during a woman’s period without a woman even knowing” she’s pregnant. It’s an important lesson—more relevant than ever, today—that the criminalization of abortion necessitates the criminalization of miscarriage.

At a Tuesday gala celebrating the fall of Roe in which Pence joined the likes of Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, with champagne in hand, he addressed the crowd and called the fall of Roe merely “the end of the beginning.” He expanded on the sentiment to RCP, saying Republicans need to “recognize that it may take us as long to restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state as it took us to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

In other words, Pence is committed to taking every possible step he can to restrict, ban, and criminalize abortion—and, by extension, all pregnancy outcomes, for the rest of his life, which will probably be a very long time (I hear Keebler elves live between 250 and 270 years.) In the parlance of reality television, the man is not here to make friends; he’s here to put pregnant people and doctors in jail. Given that anti-abortion activists are getting bolder and bolder about how their endgame is to enact fetal personhood—legal recognition that fetuses and embryos have the same rights as pregnant people—I fully expect Pence to be on the frontlines of this fight shortly.

Not unlike a straight woman watching a movie starring Sebastian Stan, our former vice president is frothing at the mouth for a national abortion ban. But the difference between Pence and said straight woman (other than having human rights in the U.S.) is that with Roe gone and Graham toiling away in the Senate, Pence has a decent chance of getting the object of his desire—possibly as soon as 2024. Friendly reminder to vote, people!