Marco Rubio draws attention to pro-life strategy, spike in church vandalism

CNA Newsroom, Mar 13, 2024 / 09:00 am

The need for the pro-life movement to update its strategy and hold the Biden administration accountable for its failure to address the wave of vandalism against Catholic churches across the country were the top two issues raised by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, in an interview with EWTN News.

Speaking with EWTN Capitol Hill correspondent Erik Rosales, Rubio expounded upon his proposed pro-life strategy released earlier this year. As part of that strategy, the Florida senator called on pro-life Americans to rally behind “supporting mothers and their babies with compassionate, pro-family policies; exposing the Democrats’ abortion extremism; and protecting the unborn by championing just limits to abortion.”

Rubio also railed against the Biden administration’s passivity as more than 400 attacks against Catholic churches in the U.S. have been perpetrated during the last four years.

“We have these anti-Christian violent extremists operating in this country, and it is not a focus or [has] the attention of this administration or this Justice Department,” Rubio told Rosales.

“They can’t find a single person or any of these people that were responsible for these, what is a pretty concerted effort to attack Catholic churches in America,” Rubio emphasized. 

In a March 5 letter to President Joe Biden, Rubio pointed out that the rash of attacks on Catholic churches “seldom result in any consequences for offenders” and demanded that Biden “make investigating, and fully prosecuting, these incidents an urgent priority for [his] administration.” 

“These attacks are not random nor are they the result of a temporary lapse in judgment by perpetrators,” Rubio, who is Catholic, wrote, citing numerous examples, including “a priest being attacked with a machete, a 249-year-old church being set on fire and nearly fully destroyed, and, in Florida, a man crashed a van into a Catholic church and then set it on fire with people inside.”

Returning to the topic of pro-life strategy in the post-Dobbs era, Rubio told Rosales that “unfortunately, a lot of the debate around abortion talks about children as a burden, as something terrible that’s going to ruin your life.”

Rubio’s strategy emphasizes the importance of “dismantling the false choice between motherhood and opportunity” while also “exposing “the truth about abortion.” 

In his pro-life strategy proposal, Rubio slams Democrats for “painting apocalyptic visions of what  a supposedly pro-life future would look like.”

“Key to their strategy,” Rubio says, “has been peddling disinformation that pro-life laws criminalize treatments for miscarriage, stillbirth, and ectopic pregnancy.”

As Rubio sees it, “we can change Americans’ perception of the pro-life movement by embracing an agenda that provides generous material support to pregnant women and their children.” He pointed to the Providing for Life Act as a concrete example, as the measure boosts paid parental leave, enhances child support enforcement, and improves the Child Tax Credit.

In his proposal, Rubio also notes that “other countries in the civilized world have far stronger limits on abortion than the average blue state. Nations like Switzerland prohibit abortions after 12 weeks with limited exceptions and require physicians to counsel women seeking abortions about the risks of the procedure, as well as provide them with information about alternatives like adoption.”

“Yet reasonable laws such as these are decried by the media as ‘draconian’ and ‘evil’ when they are proposed in our country,” Rubio observes. “If Republicans cannot go at least as far in limiting abortion as Europe, then truly we have failed our voters and do not deserve to be described as a pro-life party.”

In 2022, Rubio co-sponsored Sen. Lindsey Graham’s bill for a 15-week abortion ban as a starting point to protect life. Graham plans to reintroduce the bill in the coming months.