Trump’s Expedient Abortion Stance
Terry H. Schwadron
April 10, 2024
Whatever Donald Trump thought he was doing to clarify his campaign views about abortion policy, he seems to be drawing unending criticism from foes and friends alike.
Trump may have simply been looking for the most politically expedient message about abortion. But what he has done is to sharpen reproductive rights as a key to the outcome of the November election.
The issue that refuses to die is back in full passion of outrage on all sides.
To quash the many questions he faces on the campaign road about the issue, Trump issued a four-minute video — obviously with no questions — to say he takes credit for a Supreme Court majority that undercut abortion rights but opposes a national policy to ban abortions. He prefers to see abortion decisions left to the states, underscoring while he wants exceptions to such bans for rape, incest, and the health of the mother.
Trump’s an ironic position for someone who insists on national unanimity for anything he utters, and it is a desperate bid to try to appeal to all sides — without satisfying any. It came across as a futile attempt to sound “moderate” to win back swing voters, as if people can’t see the reality of abortion bans being adopted across a wide array of Republican-led states.
The would-be Trump exceptions are ignored in bans in Texas and other states. The Florida Supreme Court just upheld that state’s laws for a ban after six weeks from conception — before most women even know that they are pregnant — without Trump’s preferred exceptions. The Arizona Supreme Court seemed to top them all yesterday with a ruling to enable use of an 1864 territorial ban on abortion — and prosecution of those who pursue it — from a time before statehood or women’s ability to vote.
Immediate and Continuing Reaction
It took the conservative right only moments to object mightily, with voices like former Vice President Mike Pence calling the backoff from a national abortion ban “a slap in the face,” and Senate ally Lindsey O. Graham Jr., R-SC, saying he “respectfully disagrees” with Trump over the need for a national ban after 15 weeks.
The Democratic response from Joe Biden and everyone who could get to a television microphone was that Trump now owns abortion bans everywhere, whether generated by Republican state legislatures or in any eventual national push. They vowed to make it a prime election issue, and Biden released an emotional television ad that blames Trump directly for a Texas woman forced to flee the state in medical emergency conditions.
And that may well be the point: In pushing back against Graham, for example, Trump said, Graham “doesn’t seem to understand” that Democrats “love this issue, and they want to keep it going for as long as Republicans will allow them to do so . . . people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the Presidency.”
So, it seems Trump is calculating political probabilities rather than any issue of rights, morals, or principles.
Over years, the various political analyses recount, Trump has taken every issue on abortion, depending on his audience. He has been pro-choice, anti-abortion, and in 2016 insisted to an interviewer that women who seek abortions should face punishment.
Politics and Reality
As columnist Michelle Goldberg argues, Trump is caught between his anti-abortion base and the majority of Americans who want abortion to be legal. Trump wants to neutralize abortion protest as much as possible, without alienating his anti-abortion followers, as suggested by columnist Jamelle Bouie. Trump just has made his election campaign more difficult, argues columnist Eugene Robinson, because this attempt to distance himself from the abortion issue won’t work.
In any case, the pundits suggest that the Trump statement is an unsatisfying canard about how he would treat abortion in office. Almost certainly, if a Republican-majority Congress passed a national anti-abortion law, Trump as president would sign it.
But more likely, he would simply appoint people to run the appropriate federal agencies to make abortion much more difficult, either revisiting or overturning distribution of abortion medications by mail or order enforcement of the 1978 Comstock Act against use of the mail for “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.”
The actual Trump video continues to use lies and exaggerated anti-abortion claims about late-term treatments and the popularity of anti-abortion laws. Facts are fungible, it is political expediency that is on the agenda.
Even if Trump hopes to stop all talk about abortion policies, neither the Right nor the Left will allow that to happen. The only question is whether enough Americans are angered by the creeping recission of perceived rights to abortion will prompt a winning election majority.
##