Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and former South Carolina governor, likened the nation’s divide over abortion rights to the removal of the Confederate flag from her state’s capitol, arguing that as governor she was able to find a middle ground on a challenging debate.

“We found consensus on a very tough issue,” Haley said Tuesday at the headquarters of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion organization, citing what she called “her most difficult challenge” as governor. “What was true then with the flag can be true now with abortion. This shouldn’t be about one movement winning and another one losing.”

Haley’s speech was meant to woo swing voters on abortion, which is emerging as a central issue in the 2024 presidential election following the Supreme Court’s reversal of abortion rights and a federal judge’s attempt to outlaw a popular FDA-approved abortion drug.

Haley told the crowd she is not against abortion “because the Republican Party told me to be” but because her husband was adopted and Haley had trouble conceiving her two children. Haley didn’t say at how many weeks she believes the procedure should be outlawed, but said there’s broad national consensus that fetuses that survive a botched abortion (an extremely rare occurrence) should be saved.

“I won’t address every single question or angle. Rather, I aim to start a constructive conversation and go from here in our divided country,” Haley said, positioning herself as someone who will listen to both sides.

While Haley approves of the Supreme Court decision that punted abortion rights back to the states, she said her goal is to help “as many mothers and babies” as possible on a federal level as president.

Tuesday marked what appears to be the first time Haley has brought up the removal of the Confederate flag in a speech since launching her presidential campaign. Haley had previously shied away from discussing the flag with primary voters unless she was asked about it directly — her attempt to walk a tricky line with the conservative base.

In 2015, Haley signed controversial legislation to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House after a gunman killed nine people, including a state senator, at a historic Black church in downtown Charleston. The gunman had posed in photos with the flag, which is used as a symbol of hate by white extremists.

Instead of taking a more definitive stance against the flag — which was raised at the South Carolina capitol in 1962 to protest the civil rights movement — Haley has framed it as a both-sides issue: people who see the flag as a symbol of hate and others who still embrace it as a representation of Southern pride. Polls have found the issue largely breaks along racial lines, with an overwhelming majority of Black people in South Carolina seeing the flag as representing racial discord.

“Our state had been bitterly divided on the flag for decades,” Haley said Tuesday. “On one side were those who wanted to tear it down. On the other side were those who wanted to keep the flag. Both were united in their sadness over the Mother Emanuel murders. But they were divided about what the flag meant.”

Haley did not appear at an evangelical cattle call for 2024 candidates over in the weekend in Iowa, where the Republican Party’s emerging divide on abortion was on display.

Polls have found that a majority of Americans want to preserve legal abortion in some form. Gallup shows that in 2023, 48% of people are unhappy with the nation’s abortion laws, with the vast majority of those people seeing the laws as too restrictive.