Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and a senior White House adviser, said this week she is “pro-life,” marking the first time she has taken a definitive public stance on the issue of abortion.
“I respect all sides of a very personal and sensitive discussion,” Trump said in a phone interview with RealClearPolitics when asked about abortion. “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 added.
A White House aide later told RealClearPolitics that Trump’s stance was both a personal belief and a response to what the aide called extreme support for abortion among Democrats.
“A huge driving part of that” position from Trump, the aide said, “is where the Democratic Party has gone.”
President Trump’s daughter also said in the interview that she is “a pragmatist when it comes to everything,” adding that she identifies herself as a “Trump-Republican.”
“I think a lot of these labels, to be quite honest, are really limiting in terms of what you call yourself or how you identify, but I don’t reject that label at all,” she said.
Ivanka Trump’s remarks come just days before an election where her father is trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden in national polls and in many battleground state surveys. President Trump has made a renewed push to shore up evangelical support, in addition to seeking out conservative Catholic voters and trying to win over college-educated suburban women.
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
There has been speculation swirling around Ivanka Trump’s position on abortion in recent years following 2017 reports of a secret meeting with then-Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.
The president’s anti-abortion stance helped him garner significant support from evangelicals in the 2016 election, with many of those supporters praising his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. She was confirmed this week by the Senate in a 52-48 vote.
During Barrett’s confirmation hearings, she said that she did not consider Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling establishing a woman’s right to an abortion, as a superprecedent, meaning a decision so widely accepted that it is invulnerable to serious legal challenges that could see it overturned.