I have long been a fan of Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Back in 2010, when he was a longshot senatorial candidate, I met him at a D.C. event after doing pro-life outreach on several Florida campuses. He was enthusiastic and encouraging about pro-life work on campuses, and put his pro-life convictions front and center during his campaigns and in his public speeches. He was my first choice for GOP presidential nominee in 2016, and I attended one of his rallies on primary day in Charleston, South Carolina, where he again highlighted his pro-life credentials.
Not only has Rubio’s voting record on the issue been excellent, but he has consistently proven to be one of the most eloquent public defenders of the pro-life position. Many pro-life politicians struggle to defend their views and find themselves on the defensive in press interviews. Not so with Rubio. I have used videos of his tangles with the press on abortion to illustrate how politicians should engage on the issue. Consider this exchange on CNN with Chris Cuomo, for example:
Rubio is precisely right: Whether or not you believe life begins at conception is not relevant. That is a scientific fact, and you do not get to decide whether or not it is true based on your ideology.
Just two years ago in 2022, Rubio noted in an address to those gathered in D.C. for the March for Life that he is convinced “that future generations will look back at these years, at these decades, and see the sheer volume — the numbers — of human beings that were never allowed to take the first breath outside the womb and be horrified by it, consider us to have been barbarians. Human life is precious, and it should be protected no matter what stage of development.”
Thus, I was incredibly disappointed that in a recent interview with CNN, Rubio backed the Trump campaign’s decision to strip support for a federal abortion ban out of the GOP platform — along with many other pro-life commitments. “For four decades, the party’s platform endorsed a national abortion ban,” Dana Bash noted. “Donald Trump opposes that, as you well know — he thinks it should be left to the states. There are a lot of conservative groups that are not happy … Do you support changing the official party platform to Trump’s position that it should be a state issue?”
“Well, I think our platform has to reflect our nominee,” Rubio replied, looking far more uncomfortable than he ever had defending the pro-life position on TV. “Our nominee’s position happens to be one grounded in reality. The reality is that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and what that basically means is that it’s not states, its voters in individual states that will get to decide how and to what level they want to restrict abortion, if at all … some states will have restrictions, some will not. So I hope that our platform will reflect our nominee.” He went on to highlight the Democrats’ extremism in supporting abortion up until birth.
I’d like to emphasize: Marco Rubio is pro-life. I understand that he’s trying to parse his words carefully, so that he can support Trump’s decision to remove the pro-life plank from the GOP platform without sounding … well, pro-choice. I don’t think he succeeds, because the GOP platform merely condemns late-term abortion — as one RNC delegate who voted against the platform told me, it is actually very similar to the Democratic platform. Rubio, like JD Vance and many other Republicans, are moderating their positions to get along in the MAGA movement, or perhaps to make themselves palatable as potential Trump running mates.
This is now at the personal level, I’m no longer even speaking as a Senator, nor trying to impose what I believe on anybody else, I’m just sharing with you why (the pro-life issue is) important to me. And I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve felt the same pressures. I’ve had people tell me, gosh, we love your tax policy, we love your fiscal policy, just don’t do the social stuff on us, I don’t want to hear about it. Turns people off, I’ve heard that too. And it gets to you sometimes. And I think, from now and then – probably not the people in this room – people are guilty of saying, let’s just tone that one down. This is not the time for that.
And then you realize that, you know, the office that we have is important, but this stuff’s all fleeting. Comes and goes, you’re a Senator today, you won’t be tomorrow, you’re in office today, you lose your next election. But at least my faith teaches that this life will end, you live – you’re lucky, you live 80 years … you’ll still be a Senator, and then you’ll be held to account. Whatever your faith teaches you, they almost all teach the same thing: you will be held to account.
At least in my case, I’m gonna be asked very squarely, I know this. Look at what I gave you, God will say. I brought your family out of extraordinarily bad circumstances and gave them opportunities. I gave you the opportunity to do things that your family never had a chance to do. I blessed you with children, who are healthy and vibrant and make a lot of noise. I blessed you with parents that encouraged you to dream, and a wife that supported you in pursuit of those dreams. I opened doors for you that you never thought were possible. When you polled below the margin of error in the first polls they took in your Senate race. When the only people who thought you could win your election all lived in your house. And when most of them were under the age of 10! I gave you the ability to speak to people and influence people. What did you do with it?
And what am I gonna say, ‘Oh, I had really good poll numbers. I got re-elected three times. I raised more money than anybody ever had. I was popular, people loved me; they patted me on the back, they gave me nice introductions. That’s what I’m gonna say I did with that? The more you are given, the more that is expected of you.And that’s not just true for us as people, that’s true for us as a nation. America’s not great because we’re smarter than other people or we work harder than anybody else. There are smart and hardworking people all over the world. America is great because God has blessed America, and America has always honored those blessings by being an example to the world.
