In May 2016, Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina walked down the aisle of the statehouse, beaming and shaking fingers, after signing laws that might largely outlaw abortion within the state after 20 weeks of being pregnant.

Still, she wished to make sure social conservatives knew the place she stood. So her workplace organized a second, solely ceremonial signing a couple of weeks later at Hidden Treasure Christian School, an evangelical academy for kids with disabilities within the coronary heart of South Carolina’s conservative Upstate area.

Standing alongside the staunchly anti-abortion lawmakers who sponsored the invoice, and flanked by dozens of youngsters, Ms. Haley made clear that her assist for his or her trigger was not simply political, but additionally private.

“I am not pro-life because the Republican Party tells me to be,” she stated, selling her assist for the ban, which prohibited abortion even in instances of rape or incest. “I’m pro-life because all of us have had experiences of what it means to have one of these special little ones in our life, to lose one, to know what it takes and how hard it is to get one.”

Seven years later, Ms. Haley’s abortion politics haven’t modified a lot. The similar can’t be stated for the nation.

At marketing campaign occasions, in speeches earlier than anti-abortion teams and from the first debate stage, Ms. Haley has solid herself as an empathetic seeker of compassionate “consensus” on one of many nation’s most divisive social points.

“We need to stop demonizing this issue,” she stated on the first Republican debate in Milwaukee final month. “It’s personal for every woman and man. Now, it’s been put in the hands of the people. That’s great.”

The Supreme Court’s overturning of federal abortion rights reworked a difficulty lengthy thought of settled by broad swaths of the American public right into a political hammer for Democrats. The speedy shift has pressured Ms. Haley and different Republicans to string the needle between what she calls her “unapologetically pro-life” report and the broad majorities of American voters who assist some type of abortion rights.

Some Republicans see Ms. Haley as pioneering a path ahead on what’s turn out to be a dangerous situation for his or her occasion because the 2022 determination. They consider her message may very well be acceptable to their occasion’s conservative, anti-abortion base with out alienating average Republicans and swing voters. For Ms. Haley, the method is an element of a bigger technique to place herself as a extra electable various to Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for governor in Michigan final 12 months, warned that Republicans would lose the messaging combat over abortion once more in 2024 except they adopted a stance just like Ms. Haley’s that’s extra centered on compassion and discovering frequent floor. Ms. Dixon misplaced her personal race after dealing with a barrage of Democratic assaults over her opposition to abortion, together with in instances of rape or incest.

“Democrats are trying to make anybody who is pro-life the enemy of women,” Ms. Dixon stated in an interview. “It felt so good to see a strong, caring woman come at this message from a personal and loving perspective.”

In a closed-door assembly this week that was first reported by NBC News, Senate Republicans mentioned new polling indicating that voters now noticed the time period “pro-life” as synonymous with being in opposition to abortion with no exceptions, in response to an individual who attended.

The polling, carried out by an excellent PAC tied to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority chief, additionally discovered that feminine politicians corresponding to Ms. Haley had been higher acquired as messengers for the Republican place on the problem. The group urged Republican senators to do a greater job of explaining extra nuanced and broadly widespread positions, together with supporting exceptions to restrictions for rape, incest and the well being of the mom.

Mr. Trump, the front-runner within the 2024 G.O.P. main race, has additionally urged Republicans to embrace less stringent restrictions, whereas resisting strain from anti-abortion activists to embrace a 15-week federal ban. Such a ban is extensively unpopular: Polling carried out final month by The New York Times/Siena College discovered that 64 % of impartial voters and 57 % of feminine voters oppose it.

While she gives little in the way in which of coverage specifics, Ms. Haley flatly dismisses the push for a 15-week federal ban as unrealistic, provided that Republicans fall wanting the margin wanted to move such a proposal by way of the Senate. Instead, Ms. Haley stakes out broad areas of what she sees as nationwide settlement, together with a ban on “late term” abortions, encouraging adoption, offering contraception and never criminalizing girls who’ve the process.

Those efforts by Ms. Haley and others to melt their method face opposition from extra strident anti-abortion activists, who view the Supreme Court’s determination to overturn Roe as a place to begin on the problem, not the tip of it.

“We need a national defender of life who will boldly articulate their pro-life position,” stated Marjorie Dannenfelser, the top of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a outstanding anti-abortion political group. “The pro-life movement must have a nominee who will boldly advocate for consensus in Congress, and as president will work to gather the votes necessary in Congress. Dismissing this task as unrealistic is not acceptable.”

Supporters and marketing campaign strategists say Ms. Haley’s method displays her private experiences. In faculty, she watched a good friend fear that her rape would lead to an undesirable being pregnant. She later struggled with infertility, and underwent fertility therapies to have her two kids. Her husband, Michael Haley, was adopted as a younger little one, an expertise that made him, she stated, “reason No. 1” for her opposition to abortion.

“I don’t know if any of the others on that debate stage or Trump can do what she has done, and go out there and talk about this in this way where it’s understanding and compassionate and empathic and it’s coming from a position of real knowledge,” stated Jennifer Nassour, the previous head of the Massachusetts Republican Party, who’s backing Ms. Haley. “She’s the only leader who can take such a divisive issue and bring everyone together on it.”

Ms. Haley’s report tells a barely extra difficult story. During her time in South Carolina, Ms. Haley pushed her conservative state to limit and restrict abortion entry.

As a state legislator, she backed payments mandating ultrasound checks and a 24-hour ready interval earlier than an abortion may very well be carried out. In 2005, she voted for a invoice granting constitutional rights of due course of and equal safety to a zygote, the fertilized egg cell that types after conception. And, 4 years later, she co-sponsored laws mandating {that a} “right to life” begins on the level when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg, a number of weeks earlier than a being pregnant can typically be detected.

Such payments have been utilized by opponents of abortion to attempt to grant constitutional rights to embryos and fetuses. Those fetal personhood legal guidelines, as they’re broadly identified, may present a authorized framework not only for banning abortion however for limiting entry to in vitro fertilization and contraception.

“My record on abortion is long and clear,” Ms. Haley stated in an April speech to the Susan B. Anthony anti-abortion group. “I voted for every pro-life bill that came before me.”

After she turned governor in 2011, Ms. Haley backed laws granting a fetus that survives a failed abortion — a uncommon prevalence — the identical medical therapy rights as an individual. She signed a regulation prohibiting personal insurance coverage firms from masking an abortion process with out the acquisition of a separate coverage rider. And she signed the 20-week ban in 2016.

In 2016, Wendy Nanny, the sponsor of the 20-week ban within the state legislature, noticed the laws as a step towards the final word objective of ending abortion rights in America. Ms. Haley, she stated, backed that effort.

“She was always supportive of anything we tried to do that was pro-life,” Ms. Nanny stated. “I never had any kind of pushback from her office.”

That anti-abortion report may very well be laborious for Ms. Haley — and different Republicans who supported related laws throughout the nation for years — to outrun in a common election. In the last decade earlier than Roe was overturned, Republican legislators enacted roughly 600 laws restricting abortion, in response to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive well being analysis group that helps abortion rights. Voters view these information otherwise within the post-Roe world, through which abortion is now all but banned in 18 states, including South Carolina.

Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster, doubted whether or not Ms. Haley may sq. her “respectful and middle-ground, compromise approach” with a decade-long report of “actually not doing that when in office.” Republicans, she stated, have far to go earlier than voters will give them the advantage of the doubt on the problem.

“Those candidates trying to walk back their previous positions on abortion look incredibly political and non-trustworthy,” Ms. Murphy stated. “Their credibility is so low on this issue that voters just fundamentally believe Republicans want to ban abortion.”

But for now, as she tries to win a Republican main, Ms. Haley’s message is discovering an viewers amongst voters in search of a substitute for Mr. Trump. As she waited for Ms. Haley to talk in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday, Betty Gay, a Republican former state consultant, praised her method.

“I think abortion is a horrible form of birth control, but there are some circumstances that require it,” stated Ms. Gay, who was nonetheless undecided concerning the main however doesn’t plan on backing Mr. Trump. “I don’t want either of the extremes.”