Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that he is optimistic that the abortion rights in the United States will soon be overturned by the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court formed during his and President Donald Trump’s administration.
Pence arrived in Budapest and spoke in a forum dedicated to demographics and family values.The conservative leaders from central Europe shared their concerns about falling birthrates in the Western world and ways to reverse this trend were also discussed in the event.
The Budapest Demographic Summit, held every two years since 2015, has become a platform for leaders to condemn migration and encourage families to have more children.
“We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself. The erosion of the nuclear family marked by declining marriage rates, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birth rates,” Pence said.
He commended the decline of abortion rates under the conservative anti-migrant Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and expressed optimism that things would change in the United States as well.
He looked back on the previous administration where he served as vice president and appointed 300 conservative judges to the federal courts, including three new justices to the Supreme Court.
“We may well have a fresh start in the cause of life in America,” Pence added. “It is our hope and our prayer that in the coming days, a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States will take action to restore the sanctity of life in the center of American law.”
Recently, abortion rights had a focal moment in the United States. Republican-led state legislatures have imposed increasingly restrictive laws and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority recently approved a law banning most abortions in Texas to be implemented.
Read More: Pregnant Teens Think Texas Abortion Law Is a Huge Nightmare
Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks comes next in the court’s schedule.
Anti-abortion activists remain hopeful that the court will utilize that case to overturn a 1973 case, Roe v. Wade, a decision that changed the entire law and paved way to a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.