Members of the Republican National Committee advanced a new party platform which removes most language opposed to abortion, prompting controversy among conservative voters.

The new language for the 2024 platform asserts that the Republican Party will “proudly stand for families and life” while contending that the Fourteenth Amendment “guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.” The platform only vows to “oppose late-term abortion” and supports access to birth control and in-vitro fertilization, also known as IVF.

The draft platform, which was approved by eighty-four platform committee members and rejected by eighteen platform committee members, is expected to be adopted by the Republican National Convention next week when they meet in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Many conservatives expressed disapproval since the version of the platform approved in 2016 included several paragraphs detailing an agenda to curtail abortion. Among other policies, that version opposed the use of any public funds to perform or promote abortion, as well as recognized that preborn babies have “a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.”

Daryl Groves, the vice president of Red State Reform, a Christian conservative grassroots organization based in Arizona, said in an interview with The Sentinel that the new Republican Party platform “falls short of a truly biblical and principled stance on behalf of the preborn.”

Groves observed that human life is “not merely sacred in the final months of pregnancy, but from the moment of fertilization.” He added that “any platform that does not explicitly commit to the abolition of all forms of abortion is insufficient and morally compromised,” as well as contended that the platform surrenders to a leftward cultural shift with respect to abortion.

“It fails to address a fundamental issue, which is the sanctity of life at every stage of development,” Groves told The Sentinel. “This sort of mindset plays right into the hands of a leftist agenda that seeks to incrementally take over the hearts and minds of Americans.”

The imminent changes to the Republican platform were suggested by the campaign for presumptive Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump, who released a controversial statement earlier this year calling for states to make their own laws on abortion. The former commander-in-chief has nevertheless waded into various state-level abortion debates: he encouraged the Alabama Legislature to legally protect IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that babies conceived during the procedure, in which a sperm and egg are artificially joined outside of the womb, can be protected by wrongful death laws.