When Republicans reaffirmed their party's platform this week, it included a supposedly moderate position on abortion. Don't believe it.
For decadesThe Republican Party has explicitly pledged its support for a call amendment of human lifewhich would extend the protections of the 14th Amendment—its guarantees of due process and equality under the law—to a zygote, from the moment an egg is fertilized, thereby banning abortion as a matter of constitutional right.
Donald Trump’s 2024 platform removes any mention of an amendment promoting human life, emphasizes state control of abortion, and explicitly expresses support for both contraception and in vitro fertilization. He appears to have succeeded in marginalizing the most ardent opponents of abortion and bringing the party a little closer to the center on this issue, where most voters are located after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling.
But a closer look reveals that the Republican platform doesn't abandon the party's longstanding commitment to fetal personification, but simply updates it and hides it behind less direct language.
“We proudly stand for families and for life,” the GOP’s 2024 pro-choice speech begins, before going on to assert that 14th Amendment guarantees support an anti-abortion stance. As one party official insisted, the language is not at all far from a staunchly “pro-life” stance because “there is protection under the Constitution.”
And while the platform suggests that abortion should be left to the states, the message is there for those in the know: the constitutional personhood of the fetus would trump state laws, even when ballot initiatives protect abortion rights.
The affirmation of the constitutional personhood of the fetus, however veiled it may seem to some, reflects an anti-abortion strategy that is on the rise in the post-Roe v. Wade era.
While Roe was the law of the land, it seemed necessary to fight directly for an amendment establishing legal personhood for citizens. If the Supreme Court did not overturn its 1973 decision (as it had long done), a constitutional amendment was the only way to overturn the right to choose. But it would also require hard-to-achieve supermajorities in Congress and in the states supporting a radical and unpopular idea. Rather than trying to overcome that hurdle and amend the Constitution, why not simply change its judicial interpretation?
Winning the support of federal judges was much easier said than done. Even conservative judges and legal scholars were not always comfortable with the anti-abortion movement, and it seemed that their methods of constitutional interpretation, including originalism, some versions of which claim to identify the original public meaning of the text, would fail to achieve the personification of the fetus. Over time, however, the anti-abortion movement and the conservative legal movement began to come together and found an originalist angle to support: that from the beginning, the nation's founders believed that the Unborn child He had the right to due process and equality. Under the law.
In other words, a constitutional amendment on human life is unnecessary because the 14th Amendment already guarantees the rights of the fetus. The Republican proposal on abortion for 2024 aims precisely at that interpretation.
Of course, a party platform is based more on theory than practice. As for what a new Trump administration can and wants to do on abortion, there are other sources to turn to.
For example, Project 2025, the widely discussed Trump 2.0 plan developed by the Heritage Foundation, promotes the revitalization of the Comstock Law, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that conservatives (including vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance) have argued prevents the mailing of abortion-related items. Its implementation, as Project 2025 envisions, could create a de facto federal ban because virtually all abortions require the use of something from a scalpel to a pill once they are mailed.
Or perhaps the new Trumpian leadership at the FDA would act to reverse the agency's scientists' decision and remove from the market mifepristone, the abortion drug used in more than half of all abortions in the United States.
Or this: Some anti-abortion groups have proposed that if Trump wins in November, he could simply use executive power to move things forward. fetal personality
Most importantly for the anti-abortion cause, a second presidential term would mean an opportunity for Trump to move the courts even further to the right. Instead of having to deal with Congress and politicians who worry about voter discontent, abortion opponents could rely on like-minded judges to promote fetal personhood — judges with lifetime appointments. Trump has already helped the movement with appointments like Matthew Kacsmaryk, the federal judge in Texas who compares the abortion rights movement to that of lifetime judges. to Nazism.
If you read between the lines, the GOP platform is not about moderation, but about creating the appearance of moderation while assuring far-right anti-abortion crusaders that the national abortion ban will remain in place if a second Trump administration has anything to say about it.
Maybe it's just a matter of time.
Mary Ziegler is a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of “Roe: The Story of a National Obsession.”
