It was a rare point of agreement for foes and supporters of abortion rights: by choosing Indiana governor Mike Pence as his vice-presidential running mate, Donald Trump had fashioned the most anti-abortion White House ticket in recent memory.
“Mike Pence is a pro-life trailblazer and Mr Trump could not have made a better choice,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B Anthony List, immediately after Trump confirmed his selection.
That group’s counterpart, Emily’s List, blasted out almost the opposite message: “Together, they are a perfect storm of classic, out of touch, GOP extremism.”
Pence’s fervent embrace of conservative social values have made Indiana a lightning rod for controversy – although the most notorious instance had nothing to do with abortion. In 2015, Pence signed an anti-LGBT bill opponents said would allow wide-scale discrimination, kicking off a furious and costly boycott of the state by much of corporate America.
But abortion rights supporters have a particular reason to fear him. Pence has signed every abortion bill to cross his desk since he was elected in 2013, including an unprecedented measure to ban abortion in cases of genetic abnormality. And before he was one of the country’s most controversial governors, Pence was a solitary congressional crusader whose one-man assaults on Planned Parenthood provided a blueprint for the entire party’s line of attack.
“He’s been at the forefront of these attacks on Planned Parenthood and on access to basic reproductive healthcare for years and years,” said Erica Sackin, director of political communications for Planned Parenthood.
“Well before it became an obsession of Republican leadership, Pence has been someone who has really laser-focused on Planned Parenthood.”
Pence’s campaign took shape in July 2007, when, as a representative, he introduced one of the first amendments in Congress to strip the organization of federal funds. It was one of six such measures he sponsored before he left Congress six years later.
In April 2011, as Republicans threatened to hold up the budget if Barack Obama did not consent to millions in cuts, Pence asserted his own demand: to defund Planned Parenthood or else shut down the entire government.
“It’s quite a remarkable record,” said Rep Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who often squares off against Republicans on issues of abortion and reproductive rights. “He’s been called a one-man crusade against Planned Parenthood, and he got his start going after them earlier than most. I would definitely call him an extremist.”
Such efforts made lots of noise but ultimately failed, withering in committee. In the 2011 budget fight, the House leadership reached a deal to fund the government, which discarded Pence’s Planned Parenthood provision. But Pence, close observers said, simply advocated such ideas ahead of their time, at a moment when Republican leadership still feared that the “war on women” label would spoil their standing with the public in the 2012 election.
By the beginning of 2016, the political landscape had shifted drastically. A far-right faction of Congress had forced the issue and the House had voted to defund Planned Parenthood on eight occasions. A bill to strip the group of federal dollars reached the president’s desk for the first time in four decades, with language sounding highly similar to Pence’s original legislative assaults.
And major party leaders, including House speaker John Boehner and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, talked openly about forcing a government shutdown in order to strip Planned Parenthood of its minuscule budget. (The group uses the funds to provide not abortions, but STI screenings, sex education, and contraception.)
“Mike Pence wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea of trying to punish women’s health clinics by withholding their funding, but he was among the most vicious about it,” said Donna Crane, vice-president of policy at NARAL Pro-Choice America, which advocates for abortion rights.
“When a Congress got elected in 2010 that was much more hostile to reproductive rights, he was the one who was ready with that bill. He’s someone who has always been a lead attacker on reproductive freedom.”
Supporters of abortion rights fear Trump has chosen a running mate who can make good on the presumptive nominee’s ominous but sometimes vague threats to all but eliminate the right to an abortion and “punish” women who have the procedure. Pence, they note, has proved more zealous than most conservative governors.
A bill he signed in March contained many of the same restrictions that have shut down abortion clinics in states such as Texas but went further, banning abortion in cases where the fetus has a severe genetic anomaly. Its restrictions are so strong that even many Republicans voted against it.
“The Republican party wasn’t always a party that embraced blocking access to reproductive healthcare,” Sackin said. “Mike Pence has been part of this troubling trend of concerted attacks.”
Pence has fulminated against Roe v Wade, the supreme court case that established a right to abortion, saying he longs for the day it “is sent to the ash heap of history” with cases such as Dred Scott, the ruling that said black slaves were property, not people, and thus could not be citizens.
He has held fast to his promises to defund Planned Parenthood, even over objections that doing so could cause a crisis in public health.
“If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions,” Pence told Politico in 2011. “As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.”
His home state made good on that promise that year, passing cuts that forced five different Planned Parenthood family planning clinics to close. One clinic had been the only HIV testing center in all of Scott county. A few years later, as governor, Pence declared a state of emergency over an HIV outbreak in the very same county.
Such intransigence could put him on a collision course with Trump, who has said, even on a Republican debate stage, that Planned Parenthood does “very good work for millions of women”.
Trump’s stance on abortion has also wavered, continuing to morph even as he runs for president. In 1999 he declared himself “very pro-choice” and as late as the spring of this year said laws on abortion “are set and I think we have to leave it that way”.
Those remarks, on CBS’s Face the Nation, came just a few weeks after Trump said women who had illegal abortions ought to face “some form of punishment”. He recently vowed to appoint supreme court justices willing to overturn Roe v Wade.
Anti-abortion groups such as the Susan B Anthony List have seesawed from pleading with Republican voters to choose “anyone but Donald Trump” to hailing Trump’s selection of Pence as “an affirmation of the pro-life commitments he’s made”.
“This is a sign that Trump fully intends to make good on his threats,” said Crane, the NARAL executive. “Mike Pence is a man who has carried those threats out. It’s a terrifying prospect and a real wake-up call … Trump told us exactly what he wanted to do, and he has brought on board the person who knows how to do it.”