Former Rep. Dan Lipinski, who represented a district in Illinois as a Democrat for eight terms in Congress, will speak at the March for Life on Friday, the Washington Examiner reports.
A self-described anti-abortion, pro-union, blue-collar Democrat, Lipinski told the Examiner that he lost in 2020 to a primary challenger, Rep. Marie Newman, D-Ill., after she won the support of multiple progressive groups and leaders in the party who targeted him because of his views on abortion.
“Clearly, if all that effort was expended by the other side to get me out of Congress, they feared my pro-life voice in the Democratic Party, no two ways about it,” Lipinski said.
“They came after me in the Democratic primary because they wanted to silence all pro-life Democratic voices,” he added. “And despite my loss, I haven't been silenced. In pro-life, Democrats aren't going to be silenced.”
Lipinski went on to say: “We need the pro-life movement to not be a partisan issue. So I want to encourage pro-life Democrats to keep at it and sort of emphasize the importance of this not becoming just a partisan issue because it hurts the pro-life movement.”
He argued that “The party is just, it's hurting itself. It doesn't make any sense. If they're just looking at it politically, and I've gone through recently, and it looked at the sort of evolution of the Democratic Party platform through the years on abortion — you know, it used to be [that] the Democratic Party recognized that there are differing views, and it took the position that it opposed overturning Roe v. Wade, but the platform said that we understand that people have different views on this and essentially said that we respect that.
"That's the position, I think, the Democratic Party should get back to at least; or else the party could, you know, it just politically is really hurting itself.”