As the Republican National Committee quietly fights over how to approach abortion in its 2024 platform before the November election, Tony Perkins, president of the extreme anti-LGBTQ organization Family Research Council, is telling Republicans to embrace a rigid anti-abortion position.
According to a May 23 NBC report, the Trump campaign and its allies at the RNC are trying to prevent anti-abortion extremists from being elected as state delegates for the party’s platform committee, so as to not push the party too far right on contentious issues before the general election.
Perkins is a delegate to the GOP platform committee, a position he’s held twice in the past, and has indicated his intention to insist upon extreme anti-abortion policies. The Family Research Council is a partner of Project 2025, a right-wing extremist policy and staffing agenda for the next Republican administration, giving the group significant influence over a potential second Trump administration.
In a May 21 speech to the Muskegon County, Michigan, GOP posted to Perkins’ YouTube page, the FRC president warned that Republicans are choosing to “retreat” from abortion and instructed them to instead commit to an “inflexible” anti-choice stance for 2024.
He also published an open letter on May 22 to FRC’s blog, The Washington Stand, adapted from his speech. He again described “rumors and reports of an organized campaign to weaken” the GOP’s abortion stance — a campaign which, from the NBC story, appears to be led by Trump allies.
On the May 28 edition of Perkins’ podcast, Washington Watch, FRC’s Quena Gonzalez built upon the speech, calling on the audience to contact their state GOP chair and ask them to select anti-abortion delegates who will “protect life in the Republican national party platform.”
In April, Perkins suggested that the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade did not go far enough, declaring: “This is not simply a state’s issue, this is for every level of government to protect the unborn.”
Additionally, Project 2025 partner Russ Vought, president of the Christian nationalist organization Center for Renewing America was announced recently as a platform committee leader.
Vought, the committee’s policy director, promotes Christian nationalism and has called to staff the next Republican administration with an “army” of conservatives who have a “biblical worldview.”
Project 2025 and its partners are strongly anti-choice and their stances go past restricting abortion and criminalizing abortion medication, seeking to crack down on reproductive health care more broadly — including striking any mention of abortion from government laws, policies, and regulations.
Correction (10/18/24): This piece originally listed Ed Martin, president of the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, as a Project 2025 partner and platform committee leader. The Project 2025 partner is actually Eagle Forum, a different organization.
