Anti-abortion groups in the U.S. are mobilizing supporters to rally behind Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court.
Anti-abortion rights groups in the United States have been mobilizing their supporters to rally behind President Donald Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court ahead of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings at the U.S. Senate.
Among them is the Susan B. Anthony List, a vocal anti-abortion political organization, whose leadership and foot soldiers on the ground have fanned out in recent weeks to seven battleground states for what they hope could potentially be the make-or-break moment in their decades long movement to overturn Roe v. Wade, the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the U.S.
On Wednesday (August 29), and under a baking hot sun, some half dozen activists went door knocking at “friendly” houses in the small riverside town of Wheeling, West Virginia, passing out fliers and asking residents if they want their Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin, to approve Kavanaugh.
Anti-abortion rights groups accuse the Democrat, who represents a state that voted nearly 70 percent for Trump in 2016, of flip-flopping on abortion. Now, they want to pressure him, along with other moderate Democratic Senators like Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, to commit to a Kavanaugh confirmation.
“So much is at stake here. This nomination could potentially tip the balance of the court on abortion,” Sue Swayze Liebel, Director of the National Pro-Life Women’s Caucus at the the Susan B. Anthony List told the media during a small press conference on Wednesday in front of the Ohio County Courthouse in downtown Wheeling.
The SBA says it has dispatched some 500 canvassers, or door knockers, to West Virginia alone and hopes to visit some two million homes across the key battleground states by the November mid-term elections.
Among other things, the anti-abortion groups want to hand more power back to the states in making decisions on abortion laws, and not to allow abortion cases to make their way to the Supreme Court where rulings have national weight. But long term, the groups seek an ultimate end to abortion in the U.S.
“For decades, the pro abortion lobby has run to the courts as sort of their last backstop to superimpose their will on the rest of the nation,” Mallory Quigley, Vice President of Communication at the Susan B. Anthony List, told Reuters on Wednesday. “What we want to say is ‘no more’. The courts are no longer going to be the imposer of the pro abortion lobby’s agenda on the United States writ large,” she said.
A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll last month found that 68 percent of Democrats believed abortion should be legal, while 61 percent of Republicans said the procedure in general should be illegal. . The issue has come to highlight the deep divide between the two parties.
Yet, some on both sides question whether Roe v. Wade could easily be overturned, given the Supreme Court’s tradition of standing by its older decisions.
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