President Donald Trump late Saturday waded into the issue of women’s reproductive rights, suggesting a new, highly restrictive measure banning abortion in Alabama signed this week went too far.
In a series of tweets, the president called himself “strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions – Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother.”
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on May 15 signed into law a measure passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature that would ban most abortions in the state. Lawmakers rejected a proposal for a rape and incest exception but would allow abortions in cases when a woman’s health is at “serious” risk.
Under the law, which is expected to be challenged, doctors who perform abortions in the state could be charged with a felony and face as much as 99 years in prison.
The Alabama measure, and fresh efforts to restrict abortions in Missouri, Georgia, Ohio and other states this year, has energized the pro-choice movement and may create an electoral backlash. At the same time, Democratically controlled states including New York and Rhode Island have passed or are considering measures to protect the right to abortion.
The Alabama chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has said it will file suit in an effort to keep the law from taking effect. Ultimately, the issue is expected to work its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a strengthened conservative majority after Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump compared his position on abortion to that taken by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He called on Republicans to be “stick together” on the issue, adding, ‘if we are foolish and do not stay UNITED as one, all of our hard fought gains for Life can, and will, rapidly disappear!”
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, said he doesn’t support the Alabama measure but that laws being passed on both sides of the abortion debate are too extreme.
“I think something much more towards the center makes a lot more sense,” Romney said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
