Speakers at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference rarely broached the subject of the right-wing position on reproductive freedom amid right-wing messaging chaos on the issue. In the instances they did bring it up, it was to push extremist positions about abortion and in vitro fertilization.
The conference took place against the backdrop of a recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos cultivated through in IVF have the same rights as living children. The court held that a person can be held liable for destroying embryos harvested through IVF, causing many providers to stop providing the reproductive service in the state.
After the ruling, Media Matters reported that Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker gave a recent interview to QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow during which Parker pushed Christian nationalist rhetoric.
One of the few mentions of reproductive rights at CPAC came during the Ronald Reagan Dinner on February 23, when featured guest Bishop Joseph E. Strickland gave a strong defense of the ruling.
"We must help them understand the intricacies of what science has done in playing God, and having children, embryos, embryonic children frozen and too easily disposed of,” he said.
Pope Francis removed Strickland from leadership of his diocese in November 2023 after investigating his governance. Strickland “had been openly critical of the pope’s efforts to reform the Catholic Church to be more inclusive of women in governance and LGBTQ+ people,” according to The Texas Tribune.
Another mention came during CPAC’s general session on Thursday, when Penny Young Nance, CEO of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, told the audience that conservatives should “not just end abortion through law, but let’s make it unthinkable."
Speakers particularly singled out female college students for abortion propaganda. At a college luncheon put on by the Clare Boothe Luce Foundation, an organization that targets young women to bring conservative speakers to college campuses, keynote speaker Abby Johnson, a longtime anti-abortion activist, largely skirted around the issue of how Republicans will message their wildly unpopular positions. Instead, she compared abortion practices in the United States to slavery and the Holocaust, a common talking point in the anti-choice movement. She also demonized women who have abortions, saying they do so to avoid getting stretch marks or being “tied down to one man.”
“John Paul II said that women are here to be mothers,” she told the group of college students, later adding, “That’s who we are in our heart. We haven't lost that, no matter what society says, no matter what they try to tell us. The feminist agenda has tried to break women.”
Johnson’s remark nods to a broader anti-feminist theme in the right-wing movement. Turning Point USA in particular has targeted young women, telling them that they should forgo pursuing an education and career, instead prioritizing becoming a wife and mother.
Abortion is a top issue for women ahead of the 2024 presidential election, especially so in the 18- to 29-year-old demographic. Nearly two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Republicans still do not have a unified message on the issue and others related to reproductive freedom, with some factions pushing for more moderate positioning (largely in vain), while leading presidential candidate Donald Trump supports a national abortion ban.
