Charlotte Pence Bond: I'm not pro-life just because I'm VP's daughter, Christian upbringing
Charlotte Pence Bond said she isn’t pro-life simply because she is the daughter of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence or because she was raised in a Christian household.
Speaking at the March for Life youth rally on Thursday in Washington, D.C., Bond, who married Henry Bond in December, said her reasons for her position also include science, statistics and the harm it causes women and communities.
“My reasons are founded in my faith, they’re grounded in the fact that I was taught the value of human life. But they’re also backed up by other things. They’re backed up by science. … Science continues to prove that life begins earlier and earlier than previously thought,” the 26-year-old said.
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Bond experienced both a strong pro-life culture at a Christian school and a pro-choice culture at a public school. Her reasons for being pro-life developed over a long period of time, she said, including during the 2016 campaign trail when her father was chosen to be Donald Trump’s running mate.
She was helping her father frame his arguments for the vice presidential debate and they both knew one of the most difficult questions that would be asked would be about abortion.
“Shouldn’t you have the right to choose? It’s their body, their choice” is the common argument made against pro-lifers.
Knowing that her father’s pro-life stance comes not from a place of judgment but from a place of love for the child and mother, Bond advised that he speak from his heart. During the debate, Pence ended up quoting Mother Teresa, who called abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace today … because it was a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child. … [A] society can be judged by how it deals with its most vulnerable.”
Bond encouraged those at the youth rally to be aware of their reasons for defending the unborn rather than being pro-life just because of the city they were raised in or the faith they grew up with.
“Why do you believe what you believe? … Why do you have that feeling in your gut that there’s something just not right about the pro-choice arguments?” she posed.
She also acknowledged that their values aren’t popular in today’s society.
“You know that you’re not the in-crowd. You’re not reflected in the mainstream media and you’re not popular all the time, but that’s OK because anyone who made a difference in the history of the world wasn’t really popular at the time,” she said.
Bond doesn’t believe that those who support abortion are evil, though she doesn’t deny that abortion itself is evil. But she believes that many who are pro-choice are “actually in pain.”
“The pro-choice culture, I believe, mostly is a culture full of people who are hurting,” she stressed, and pro-lifers need to reach them.
While some are shouting their abortion through the new social media campaign, Bond believes that more than wanting to celebrate, people are wanting to get their experiences off their chest anonymously online to try to move on.
“Let’s not allow the pro-choice movement to own these stories anymore,” she said. “Let’s be the people that these women and men run to in order to tell their stories and help them to embrace life, to perhaps find healing and be able to move forward.”
Bond is optimistic that they will see a “post-Roe America,” when the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion will be overturned.
Until then, she encouraged what she called the “modern-day abolitionists” to spread the message that “life is worth it.”
