Pence tonight danced around coming clean on his and Trump’s anti-women agenda. But their record is clear. Trump apologist Mike Pence is billed as Donald’s “clean-up guy,” but the two are on the same page when it comes to substance — especially where Trump and Pence’s anti-women views and agenda are concerned.
In fact, when it comes to women’s issues, Mike Pence has actually legislated Donald Trump’s sexist rhetoric and anti-women policy positions.
In the 1990s, Pence said working women stunt their kids emotional growth; and while in Congress, Pence led the GOP charge on defunding Planned Parenthood. Mike Pence has been a hardline anti-choice opponent for decades, and he has no qualms about trumpeting his anti-women record.
Trump-Pence: Anti-Choice Extremists
- Pence: Pence supported a zero-exception abortion ban, including where the life of the mother is at risk, and he cosponsored at least four “personhood” bills to that effect while he was in Congress — in 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2011.
As governor, Pence just this year signed an anti-abortion law that added new restrictions to ban any abortions “motivated solely by the mother’s objection to the fetus’s race, gender or disability, like Down syndrome,” and which even imposed provisions for “holding doctors liable” in such cases. On the campaign trail, Pence says he and Donald Trump will send Roe v. Wade to “the ash heap of history” — and there’s no reason to doubt him.
- Trump: Donald Trump has promised to appoint anti-choice justices to the Supreme Court if he’s elected. And Trump has said that there “has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions — that says it all.
- Pence: In a 1997 op-ed, Pence claimed that working mothers stunt kids’ emotional growth — nice.
- Trump: Similarly, Donald Trump has said, “[P]utting a wife to work is a dangerous thing.”
- Pence: In 2011, then-Rep. Mike Pence threatened to shut-down the government over defunding Planned Parenthood. And in 2007 “sponsored the first bill to defund Planned Parenthood.” You might say, as a Vox headline put it, that “Mike Pence launched Republicans’ war on Planned Parenthood.”
- Trump: Donald Trump has acknowledged that Planned Parenthood benefits “millions and millions of women” but said he’ll defund it anyway.
- Pence: During his time in Congress, Pence opposed equal pay legislation and on three occasions — in 2007 and twice in 2009 — voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
- Trump: “Once you get it where everybody gets the same, I mean, you’re into a socialistic society.”
Watch “Trump-Pence: Women Know Better” here.
Published: Oct 4, 2016