Nikki Haley Says Pledging a Federal Abortion Ban Wouldn’t Be ‘Honest’
The Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley refused on Sunday to endorse a federal abortion ban at a specific number of weeks’ gestation, saying that to do so would be to lie to the American people about what is politically possible.
“I think the media has tried to divide them by saying we have to decide certain weeks,” Ms. Haley said in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “In states, yes. At the federal level, it’s not realistic. It’s not being honest with the American people.”
She was responding to a question from her interviewer, Margaret Brennan, about why she would not join another likely candidate, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, in endorsing a 20-week national ban.
Ms. Haley has said — and she repeated in the interview — that the Senate filibuster makes it impossible to pass a federal abortion ban as strict as the ones that many Republican-led states have passed since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, and that any anti-abortion president will therefore need to find a “national consensus.” (A Republican Senate majority could, if it chose, remove the filibuster.) But her comments on Sunday stood out for the explicitness of her rejection of committing to a gestational limit.
Source: The New York Times
