Trump’s Mirage of Moderation on Abortion
What the 2024 Republican platform tells us about the direction of the thoroughly Trumpified GOP
I’ll have something more detailed to say later this week about the shape of the presidential race after the extraordinary events of the past month. Today I want to focus on one of the more surprising developments in Donald Trump’s effort to sell another term to skeptical or hostile voters: his insistence on stripping the most extreme pro-life language out of the Republican Party platform.
Roe, RIP
Seventeen months after Trump left office, the Supreme Court rolled back the reproductive rights of the female half of the population, with the justices Trump appointed providing three of the six votes in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade nearly half a century after the landmark decision. Dobbs, and Trump’s role in it, infuriated tens of millions of American women, fueling better than expected results for the Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections and rewarding progressives with positive outcomes in abortion-related referenda and special elections in the two years since.
But pro-choice voter mobilization wasn’t accomplished simply by the Dobbs decision itself. It was also motivated by the way the pro-life movement and its allies in the GOP responded to the gutting of Roe.
For decades, conservative intellectuals and legal scholars made the case against Roe in federalist terms: The issue of reproductive rights was far from settled when, in 1973, the high court overturned laws regulating abortion in all fifty states by declaring abortion a constitutional right. It would have been much better, conservatives argued, for the court to demonstrate humility by allowing state legislatures, and ultimately state-level public opinion, to continue determining abortion policy. Hence the need to overturn Roe, so the issue could be returned to the states.
Yet the pro-life movement and its allies in the GOP didn’t respond to Dobbs by settling for a reversion to the state laws that were on the books in 1973. Instead, they pushed further in many states, moving abortion bans closer or all the way to conception. (Abortion is currently banned with no exceptions for rape or incest in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Dakota.) Some of these states have also experimented with novel and outrageous methods of preventing pregnant women from crossing state lines to procure abortion services elsewhere. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have shown they aim to pass a nationwide ban on the procedure. Would they choose 15 weeks, 12 weeks, 6 weeks, zero weeks (a ban from conception on)? It would depend on what they could get away with, with the pro-life movement insisting on the earliest possible line.
This is not especially surprising. As I pointed out in an early post at this Substack, the Republican Party platform first called for a constitutional amendment banning all abortions in the United States all the way back during Ronald Reagan’s campaign for re-election in 1984. Reagan won that year in a landslide, and the GOP has re-affirmed this draconian position ever since.
Until this year, at least.
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