When it comes to abortion, Republicans are doing nothing less than manipulating America.
Aware that this divisive issue could be its Achilles heel in November, the Republican Party is seeking to soften its opposition to abortion rights.
Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance deleted from his website absolutist anti-abortion rhetoric During last week's Republican National Convention, on Monday, the day former President Trump named Vance as his running mate, Vance's Senate campaign website championed “the sanctity of all life” and called for “eliminating abortion.” On Tuesday afternoon, The language was gone, according to HuffPost, and then the website disappeared and redirected users to Trump's website.
“My view is that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party and his views on abortion are going to be what dominate this party and drive it forward,” Vance told Fox News on Monday. “You have to believe in reasonable exceptions because that’s where the American people are.”
But that’s not how the American people feel. The American people overwhelmingly believe that abortion should be legal in almost all cases, not just “reasonable exceptions.” It’s a minority — the vocal Christian right to whom Trump owes his victory in the Republican Party — that doesn’t want women to ever have abortions, period.
Hence the gaslighting.
It all started after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. That year’s midterm elections gave Republicans a rude shock in public opinion over the decision, which ended a half-century of federal reproductive rights. Polls had identified inflation as voters’ top concern, but abortion ended up as a dark cloud over Republican candidates.
Younger women and women over 65 turned out strongly for Democrats, who gave up only a small fraction of the House seats they were expected to lose as the party in power. Half of voters and nearly two-thirds of Democrats said the court's decision on abortion, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, had a major impact on their decisions. Dobbs, one Democratic strategist told NPR, “made this argument of Republican extremism more real to voters. He connected the dots.”
And now, in an effort to win over suburban women, the Republican Party is fighting to… disconnect those points.
A Wall Street Journal poll last spring found that while Trump narrowly led President Biden in six of seven battleground states, 39% of suburban women said abortion was a decisive issue for them, more important than any other. A majority said they viewed Trump’s stance on abortion as too restrictive.
So how can Trump allay these voters' fears? As he always does: by making things up.
First, he claims he never supported a federal abortion ban, which is, of course, a blatant lie. As president, he supported a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy; he later said he was open to one after 15 weeks. And he even told Chris Matthews in 2016 that women seeking abortions should face “some kind of punishment.”
And, of course, he's spent the last two years bragging about his Supreme Court nominees, all three of whom voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Brett M. Kavanaugh, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett also engaged in deception of their own when they misled the Senate about their views on the issue during their confirmation hearings. They all said they respected the principle of stare decisis, which holds that judges should be guided by decisions made by previous courts, such as Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that reaffirmed and refined the rights established in Roe.
In April, Trump officially backtracked on his earlier stances, saying in a video posted on his Truth Social platform: “My view is that now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine that by voting or legislation or maybe both. And what they decide should be the law of the land — in this case, the law of the state.”
But in June, in a video message recorded for the Danbury Institute, a coalition of Christian nationalists who have described abortion as “child sacrifice,” Trump seemed to indicate he agreed. “I will stand with you, shoulder to shoulder,” he promised. “You are going to come back like almost no other group.”
In a capitulation to Trump’s political calculation, the Republican platform has watered down its position on abortion for the first time in decades. Since 1984, the platform has adopted a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Now, the platform says states should be free to determine their own laws on the issue and that the party will support policies that “promote prenatal care, access to contraception and in vitro fertilization” or fertility treatments.
Not surprising, given that voters have supported reproductive rights in all seven states that have put abortion on the ballot since Dobbs. Voters in 11 other states will have the chance this fall to keep abortion legal or enshrine it as a constitutional right.
Republicans across the country are stripping away American women's autonomy while pretending otherwise. In November, women and all of us who support them will have a fighting chance to take it back.
