Kellyanne Conway: Trump kept his anti-abortion promise with Kavanaugh

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway confirmed what many of us feared when she said Trump kept his “promise” to the anti-choice movement by confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

On Sunday morning’s edition of “This Week,” host Jonathan Karl asked Conway if she expects the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationwide, now that Kavanaugh has been confirmed.

First, Conway tried to dodge the question by citing Kavanaugh’s totally meaningless assertion that Roe is “settled law.”

But as Karl pointed out, Trump has explicitly promised on more than one occasion that he would nominate a justice who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. And this promise was a big deal to anti-abortion activists, who were wary about Trump at first because he used to be pro-choice.

Karl repeatedly asked Conway whether Trump had broken this promise — and Conway finally dropped the act.

“No, it’s not a broken promise,” Conway said, claiming that Trump is nominating people “who are going to apply the law.”

And now, she said, “people are going to look at state law and the circuit law” for ways to restrict abortion.

Conway also claimed that Americans don’t really understand what Roe does, and suggested that some state abortion restrictions are allowed under Roe. 

But the restrictions she listed — such as letting state governments ban abortion based on a woman’s reason for getting it, or banning abortion in the second trimester after 20 weeks based on junk science about “fetal pain” — have already been struck down by several courts as unconstitutional because they contradict Roe v. Wade.

And for decades now, the major strategy of the anti-abortion movement has been passing laws that directly contradict Roe v. Wade — in the hopes that court challenges to one of those laws might make it all the way to the Supreme Court, and that a conservative court would take that opportunity to overturn Roe.

Even as she announced her vote to confirm Kavanaugh on Friday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) still claimed to be convinced that he would not overturn Roe v. Wade.

Collins has no reason to be convinced of this. Kavanaugh has a strong record of hostility to reproductive rights — and emails that surfaced during his confirmation suggested that Kavanaugh doesn’t believe Roe is “settled law” after all.

“I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” Kavanaugh wrote in a leaked email.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh also callously dismissed the prospect of women dying as a result of anti-abortion laws, and showed ignorance and hostility toward reproductive health care by repeating a false right-wing talking point that contraceptives are “abortion-inducing drugs.”

Conway’s remarks prove that Kavanaugh’s confirmation has endangered the rights of every woman in America — and that this White House doesn’t care who knows it.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.