Nikki Haley needs a way to differentiate herself from the many hard-core culture warriors in the 2024 Republican presidential field. On Tuesday, she tried to do this by positioning herself as a relative moderate on abortion in a speech delivered at the headquarters of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. The group is basically the Vatican of U.S. anti-abortion extremism, so it was a bold choice of venue for articulating GOP heresy on the issue.
Haley called on the anti-abortion movement to stage a strategic retreat, encouraging her fellow forced-birth fans to search for “consensus” on abortion policy beyond their ranks and across party lines. Without citing any poll numbers, Haley said Republicans need to focus on abortion restrictions that command strong popular support, blaming “the media” for an atmosphere of polarization and “demonization.”
“They’ve turned a sensitive issue that has long divided people into a kind of gotcha bidding war,” Haley said. “How many weeks are you for? How many exceptions are you for? And the list goes on. But these questions miss the point. If the goal is about saving as many lives as possible, then you don’t save any lives if you can’t enact your position in the law. And you can’t do that unless you find consensus.”
Given the powerful pro-choice majorities in much of the country (including in many red states), that would mean a retreat to 1990s-style “symbolic” restrictions on rare and unpopular late-term abortions that are easy to stigmatize. These were her examples of “consensus” — some of them eye-rollingly bad but none resembling the loud-and-proud maximum agenda of the post-Roe anti-abortion movement.
“There is broad public agreement that babies born during a failed abortion deserve to live,” Haley said. “There is broad political agreement that we should never pressure moms into having an abortion … We can broadly agree that pro-life doctors and nurses should never be forced to violate their beliefs.”
Essentially, Haley is saying that seeking “consensus” from a “pro-life” point of view means finding some things that poll at around 80 percent — just like anti-abortion activists used to do when pushing anything more extreme violated the U.S. Constitution. Only now this approach would be dictated not by constitutional law but the laws of politics.
If you listened carefully to Haley, she did not categorically reject the idea of Congress setting national abortion policies, which is the litmus-test demand of SBA Pro-Life America. She simply described the strategy as hopelessly impractical given the need for a trifecta and 60 Senate votes to enact a preemptive statute (she did not address the idea that the filibuster could be killed or modified to accommodate federal abortion legislation).
It’s unclear how Haley’s pitch for a strategic retreat will be received in anti-abortion circles. It’s hard to imagine it going over well. But in terms of Republican politicians who don’t really care about abortion one way or the other and look at polls rather than into their own consciences, it must be encouraging to find a presidential candidate who is fixated on the polls — and the massive evidence that Republican-sponsored abortion bans are alienating voters all over the U.S. Maybe that will help Haley occupy a “moderate” lane in the 2024 field — if that term is even appropriate for a politician who is loudly transphobic and harbors some of the most virulently anti-labor views of any major politician since the Gilded Age.
Perhaps the most cringeworthy aspect of Haley’s “consensus” pitch was the credential she cited for her ability to forge a national agreement on abortion: her leadership in securing an agreement in 2015 to take down a Confederate battle flag displayed at the South Carolina state capitol in the wake of a white-racist massacre in a Charleston church. While she did the right thing (for her state and her political career) in that moment, it was not much of a profile in courage. By 2015, she was pushing on an open door — unlike the southern politicians in both parties who tried to take down Confederate symbols much earlier (including her Republican predecessor David Beasley did 20 years earlier). If she’s going to wait around for a national consensus on abortion to unfold at her feet, it will be long after her political career ends, and it might be the marginalization of the anti-abortion cause that has already occurred in so many other countries.
More on life after roe
- ERA Ratification Is Now Up to Trump’s Supreme Court
- The Unlikely Reason RFK Jr. Could Be Rejected by the Senate
- Project 2025’s Mastermind Is Obsessed With Contraception
