North Carolina’s GOP Gov. Candidate Uses Wife’s Abortion Story to Fake Moderate Abortion Position

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion bans and their broad unpopularity have been costing Republicans elections. Consequently, with former President Trump leading the way, they’re attempting to rhetorically distance themselves from their own laws—all while very much keeping these laws in place, and working to elect Trump, who could impose a national abortion ban.

Mark Robinson, the GOP’s nominee for governor of North Carolina, and a Holocaust-denier who’s called LGBTQ people “maggots,” is fully in on Trump’s strategy. Robinson rolled out a new ad at the end of last week referencing his own wife’s abortion story, which he first shared in 2022. Robinson said at the time that he paid for his future wife’s abortion in 1989 and regrets it to this day.

The ad specifically touts North Carolina’s 12-week ban, which may not be a total ban but has contributed to gutting access across the South. Robinson calls his and his wife’s abortion a “silent pain between us that we never spoke of.” (Everyone has a right to feel however they feel about their abortion —that doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s experience!) Robinson said their abortion experience is the reason he “stands by” the state ban’s 12-week cut-off and “common-sense exceptions for the life of the mother, incest, and rape, which gives help to mothers and stops cruel late-term abortions.” 

I’ve yet to see a Republican ad about abortion that doesn’t disgust me, but it feels particularly egregious to separate “good” abortions from “bad” like this, especially when abortions later in pregnancy stem from medical complications or other difficult, personal situations. These experiences, and those of rape victims—or anyone who has an abortion for any reason—shouldn’t be pitted against each other for political points. And, as numerous legal experts, rape victims, and pregnant people who have suffered through fetal abnormalities have long contended, these exceptions don’t work.

Despite this ad and its mixed messages about Robinson’s abortion position, his campaign told Axios in a statement that Robinson “will work to make North Carolina a destination for life.”

This pivot comes after, just months ago in February, Robinson said at a campaign event that a 12-week ban was a start, but he’s aiming for a total ban: “We’ve got it down to 12 weeks. The next goal is to get it down to six and then just keep moving from there.” As for his ad’s insinuation that he’d support rape victims’ access to abortion, that’s in contrast with comments of his from 2021, endorsing the idea that pregnancy immediately negates one’s bodily autonomy: “Once you make a baby, it’s not your body anymore—it’s y’all’s body. And yes, that includes the daddy.” 

Robinson previously said abortion “murders [the Black community’s] children by the millions,” and in 2019, slut-shamed abortion patients, who, again, include his wife: “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It’s about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” These comments go hand-in-hand with Robinson’s history of belittling rape victims and fanatically siding with sexual predators.

Robinson’s pivot to posture as moderate on abortion is about politics. It’s the same reason Trump is lying that he’d leave abortion up to the states, which is already awful. It’s the same reason the official Republican Party platform barely mentions abortion—while still implicitly threatening to impose fetal personhood. It’s the same reason Republican candidates across the board are doing everything they can to downplay or not talk about the issue. All polling shows the deep unpopularity of abortion bans, and Republicans think performative moderate positions or some pretense at compromise and compassion (for some cases) can save them. But in the same way “common-sense exceptions” don’t work, compromise on whether pregnant people’s bodily autonomy doesn’t, either.