Facing a tight race, Ted Cruz goes quiet on abortion

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has been a loud anti-abortion crusader throughout his political career.

But as reproductive rights loom over the election season as a key issue for voters, Cruz is uncharacteristically quiet.

The Texas Republican, running for a third term in the Senate, is locked in a tight race against U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, who has made restoring access to abortion and blaming Cruz for the toppling of Roe v. Wade central to his campaign.

This past week, Allred’s campaign, boosted by an influx of cash from Senate Democrats, began airing an ad on TV and streaming platforms across the state that blasted Cruz for his anti-abortion record.

Texas has banned almost all abortions — including in cases of rape and incest — since Roe was overturned. Since then, Cruz has been more careful about how he engages on the topic. He has repeatedly called abortion a state issue, while offering more vocal support for in vitro fertilization.

Cruz, through a spokesperson, declined a request for an interview. The Texas Tribune reached out to his campaign eight times over six weeks to ask about his positions, posing nine initial questions via email and several follow ups on topics ranging from his past support for a national abortion ban to how he squares his belief in fetal personhood with his support for IVF — a process which routinely involves the disposal of fertilized embryos.

Cruz’s campaign did not respond directly to questions, instead providing links to previous statements he had made on the topic in other interviews. Those statements did not address several specific questions.

While Democrats have not won statewide in Texas in 30 years, the issue could pose a risk for Cruz, who squeaked to victory in 2018 against Beto O’Rourke by less than three percentage points. Though polling shows Texans prioritizing issues like border security and the economy over abortion, more Texans believe that the state’s abortion laws are too strict, and Democrats are banking on the issue boosting turnout nationwide in a presidential election year.

Abortion ban

When the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, Cruz celebrated the decision as “nothing short of a massive victory for life” that would not outlaw abortion across the country, but leaves “abortion policy up to the states and returns power to the American people.”

“This is a momentous day, and yet the fight for life doesn’t end with the Dobbs decision,” he said in a statement after the ruling. “It simply begins a new chapter. I’ve been proud to stand for life in the U.S. Senate, and I will continue to do so as we navigate the path ahead.”

Republicans have faced scrutiny in recent months about their past efforts to pass a federal abortion ban, with Democrats warning that former President Donald Trump would press for further restrictions.

In 2021, before Roe was overturned, Cruz cosponsored a 20-week federal abortion ban, which included exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. He cosponsored a similar ban at least six times over his Senate career. He did not sign onto a 15-week ban when it was introduced in September 2022. In 2023, he co-introduced a bill that would allow states to exclude medical providers that perform abortions from state Medicaid funding. None of those measures advanced through Congress.

Cruz did not respond directly to a question about whether he still supports a federal ban. But in a past interview his campaign provided to the Tribune, he said that abortion policy is up to each state.

“Questions of what the rules of abortion are will be made by state officials in Austin, the state legislature, the governor. And the situation we have right now, every state makes different rules,” Cruz said in an August interview with WFAA.

Trump, during the vice presidential debate on Oct. 1, said on social media for the first time that he would veto a national abortion ban, after backing a series of shifting positions over the course of his third campaign for the White House.

Abortion exemptions

Cruz declined to directly answer whether he thought Texas should add carveouts for rape and incest and if he thought the state’s exception to save the life of the mother was working.

In the WFAA interview, he pointed to legislation he has supported with those exceptions, while reiterating that the decision would be made at the state level.

But during his 2016 presidential run, Cruz said at a town hall in Wisconsin that he did not support an exemption for rape.

“When it comes to rape, rape is a horrific crime against the humanity of a person, and needs to be punished and punished severely,” Cruz said. “But at the same time, as horrible as that crime is, I don’t believe it’s the child’s fault.”

Texas law allows abortions only in instances where the life of the mother is at risk. Critics, including Allred, say that exemption is unclear and has resulted in women — such as Kate Cox, who was denied an emergency abortion by the Texas Supreme Court after finding out her pregnancy was no longer viable — being unable to access necessary medical care.

When asked if he thought the law needed clarifying or changing, Cruz’s campaign pointed to an interview he sat for on CNN. When asked during that interview if he agreed with the court’s ruling in Cox’s case, he said the Texas Supreme Court “was right” to direct the Texas Medical Board to “set the rules.”

“I think there’s a very good argument that she fell under that exception,” he said. “But what the Texas Supreme Court said in its opinion is it asked the Texas Medical Board go in and set clear rules.”

The Texas Medical Board adopted guidance in June for how doctors should interpret the state’s new abortion laws, but declined to provide a list of cases in which an abortion should be permitted.

IVF

This year, Cruz has become increasingly vocal about his support for IVF, which he calls a “miracle.”

In February, a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court sparked a nationwide panic about the future of access to IVF. That decision said that frozen embryos should be considered people, and that anyone who disposed of them could be liable for wrongful death. The Alabama Legislature subsequently passed a law to protect fertility treatments.

In May, Cruz introduced a bill with U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Alabama, that he said would protect IVF on the federal level by excluding any state that bans the treatment from federal Medicaid dollars.

“It simply does what needs to be done: safeguarding the right of couples to grow their family if they choose to use IVF, because this should not be a political issue,” Cruz said on the Senate floor in September describing his bill.

The bill, which Democrats blocked, would not create a statutory right to access fertility treatments.

Critics panned it as lip service and “incentivizing far-right, anti-choice policymakers in deep red states to defund health care for low-income Americans” without barring them from also outlawing IVF.

Cruz voted against Democratic legislation that would create a federal right to access fertility care, saying the bill infringes on religious freedoms — though the measure does not require medical professionals who may oppose IVF to provide any treatments.

Cruz also did not respond to a question asking if he supported an idea Trump floated to make IVF free for all Americans. Trump did not explain how that proposal would be implemented.

Allred said he would support the Democratic IVF bill, which was backed by two Senate Republicans, and he cosponsored a related measure in the House to federally protect fertility treatments.

Cruz did not respond to questions about whether he believes an embryo created through IVF constitutes a person.

In 2015, during his presidential campaign, Cruz signed a pledge to back a personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would “guarantee a constitutional right to life for every innocent human being, from earliest biological beginning until natural death.”

He embraced personhood measures in February 2016, before ducking questions about the topic a couple of months later.

Cruz has argued that his support for IVF is not inconsistent with a belief in fetal personhood by pointing to states that have adopted both personhood amendments and IVF protections.

“There are three states — Alabama, Georgia and Missouri — all of which have adopted personhood amendments, and all of which protect IVF,” he said on the Senate floor in June. “The Democrats maintain that IVF is in jeopardy, and yet the facts are precisely to the contrary.”

After the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision, IVF providers paused treatments across the state. Most resumed services once the Alabama Legislature passed protections for fertility treatments. But that law did not address the question of personhood, and simply provides immunity to IVF providers and patients.

Filibuster

At the same time, Cruz has characterized Allred as an extremist on abortion and accused him of supporting “abortion literally up until the moment of birth.”

Allred’s campaign rejected that claim as a scare tactic, providing a statement he made to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in response to Cruz’s allegations.

“I find it offensive that Ted Cruz would knowingly misstate not only my position but what has been the standard in this country for the last 50 years,” he said, saying a return to Roe would allow states to restrict abortions after viability while also leaving the decision of whether to have an abortion to patients and their doctors.

Meanwhile, Allred has tried to pin the end of Roe and subsequent state abortion bans on Cruz’s support for anti-abortion state lawmakers and his position on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which advanced three conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices.

“He is singularly responsible for what’s happening in our state,” Allred said.

Allred has been a consistent abortion rights advocate throughout his tenure in Congress.

After he was elected to the U.S. House in 2018, Allred cosponsored and voted in favor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would create a federal protection for abortion access. The bill passed the House in 2021 and 2022 but died in the Senate. Allred has also spoken out against local efforts to ban the use of roads and highways to obtain an abortion out of state.

“We have to restore freedom to Texas women and Texas families,” he said. “And the way we do that is going to be at the federal level.”

If elected to the Senate, Allred said he would support changing the filibuster to enable passage of a federal abortion protection law. The Senate requires 60 votes to move forward on any legislation — a threshold meant to protect the minority party’s power and foster bipartisanship, but which has stymied Democrats’ efforts to pass abortion and voting rights legislation over Republican resistance.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, recently reiterated her support for carving out an exception to the filibuster for abortion legislation — though institutionalists warn that lowering the threshold to a simple majority would be a slippery slope that could lead to less durable reforms and sap the minority’s leverage when the other party comes into power.

Still, Allred argued that the Senate now exists in an “ahistorical period in which the filibuster is being abused,” and that the chamber ought to return to a rule that required any senator blocking a bill to speak on the Senate floor for the duration of their filibuster.

This story was originally published by the Texas Tribune