DNC launces billboards in North Carolina targeting Trump on abortion

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) launched billboards in North Carolina Saturday targeting former President Trump on his abortion stance, ahead of Trump’s rally in Wilmington.

Sixteen billboards will be displayed in Charlotte and Wilmington, in both English and Spanish, hitting Trump on his perceived support of the Tar Heel State’s 12-week abortion ban, which was enacted after Republican lawmakers overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) veto. This is the most billboards the DNC has launched in response to Trump’s influence on states this election cycle, the committee said.

“Donald Trump is responsible for the attacks on reproductive rights that we’re seeing in North Carolina and across the nation,” DNC spokesperson Jackie Bush said in a statement, shared with The Hill. “His anti-freedom agenda is already endangering the lives of women in North Carolina, but Trump and his cronies won’t stop until every woman across the country lives under an extreme national abortion ban.

“That’s why women in North Carolina and across the country will reject Trump’s extreme bans at the ballot box this November and send President Joe Biden back to the White House,” Bush wrote.

The ad campaign comes a few weeks after Trump declined to take a position on a potential federal abortion ban, saying the fate of the procedure should be left to individual states. In a roughly four-minute video posted to Truth Social, he said he was proud to have ended Roe v. Wade, but did not endorse any kind of federal abortion legislation, which some conservative groups have pushed him to do.

He later argued that a national ban was “unnecessary” because of the Supreme Court ending the federal right to abortion access.

“We don’t need it any longer. Because we broke Roe v. Wade, and we did something that nobody thought was possible,” Trump said. “We gave it back to the states. And the states are very working very brilliantly, in some cases conservative, in some cases not conservative. But they’re working and it’s working the way it’s supposed to.”

The former president has also said he would not sign a federal ban on the procedure if reelected in November and it passed Congress.

Abortion access now is a state-by-state patchwork of laws that is ever-changing, as new restrictions take effect.  Many states have also pushed to put abortion on the ballot, spurring hope among Democrats that measures aimed at enshrining rights around abortion access could boost turnout and help their candidates in the most competitive races.

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