Former Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that he hopes the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will overturn Roe v. Wade when the justices take up a Mississippi case in December.
“We may well have a fresh start in the cause of life in America,” Pence said at a conference in Budapest, Hungary, according to ABC News.
“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 at the center of American law,” he said.
The Supreme Court on Dec. 1 will hear arguments on Mississippi’s law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks.
The law is seen as the greatest challenge to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion.
Speaking at the Budapest Demographic Summit, the former veep also raised concerns about falling birth rates.
“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.
Former President Donald Trump placed three justices on the court — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — creating a 6-3 conservative majority on the court.
Earlier this month, the justices allowed a controversial Texas law restricting abortion to stand.
The Texas law bans the procedure once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually around six weeks, and authorizes citizens to enforce the law by allowing them to sue doctors or anyone else involved in terminating a pregnancy.
In an interview this month, Trump appeared to take credit for the court’s action.
“Well, I will tell you this. We do have a Supreme Court that’s a lot different than it was before, it was acting very strangely. And I think, probably not in the interests of our country,” Trump said in an interview.
