Donald Trump Cannot Escape Roe v. Wade

Written by Molly Jong-Fast

Democrats find a successful campaign point in abortion rights, posing a dilemma for Republicans as election season approaches. Suburban voters typically back reproductive rights, yet a nationwide prohibition is what the MAGA base craves. Donald Trump, whose conservative justice appointees spearheaded the reversal of Roe v. Wade, believes he can navigate this complex situation.

The New York Times revealed on a Friday - three days following the Republicans' approximate eight-point loss of George Santos's congressional seat in New York - that Trump secretly backed a 16-week abortion ban. The report revealed Trump's transactional angle towards abortion ever since his presidential candidacy in 2015. Interestingly, after the Roe v. Wade decision, he has tactfully evaded defining a clear stance on abortion restrictions.

Trump's position has varied throughout the primary. He spoke vaguely last autumn about persuading "both sides" to "agree to a number of weeks or months." However, he didn't define whether such agreements should be state or federal. "It could be state, or it could be federal," Trump stated on Meet the Press. "I don’t, frankly, care." In the same interview, he tagged Florida’s six-week ban, enacted by his past rival Ron DeSantis, a "terrible mistake," but later boasted his pride in "terminating" Roe. 

Trump seems to be carving out a new outlook ahead of the general election according to anonymous sources who spoke to the Times. "Know what I like about 16?" Trump was quoted saying. "It’s even. It’s four months." It seems Trump believes the key to negotiation is effective marketing. However, the Trump campaign refrained from addressing his private comments, offering the Times this statement: “As President Trump has stated, he would sit down with both sides and negotiate a deal that everyone will be happy with.”

Although Trump displays erratic behavior and autocratic dreams, he possesses sharp political intuition. He's aware that abortion is a losing issue for him and the Republican party. A proposed 16-week federal ban might appear more appealing, even if it's far from genuine compromise. Such a suggestion would likely maintain red-state abortion bans while limiting abortion in blue states. This seems to be a superficial mercy extended to supporters of abortion rights while he campaigns. Meanwhile, his allies purportedly are "developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration."

Trump won over the right pledging to overturn Roe. Even though he committed to thisduring a 2016 presidential debate, not all voters believed he'd follow through or get the chance once in office. Although Hillary Clinton understood the implications of a Trump administration, because he lacked a voting record, he was viewed by many as a sort of Rorschach test, a chance for individuals to see their own desires reflected. Unlike most presidential candidates, Trump possessed far-reaching name recognition in the absence of a voting history. Strangely, having formerly declared himself a "very pro-choice" Democrat possibly aided him with swing voters. However, what Trump might do in the White House is no longer theoretical; he managed to abolish Roe, pleasing hardliners and jeopardising women's lives, and he can't escape that reality.

Following the Supreme Court's elimination of the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, Democrats have performed well in nationwide elections. Voters in staunchly Republican Kansas rejected an anti-abortion measure around six weeks afterwards, and access to abortion remained a potent issue in the 2022 midterms and the 2023 out-of-cycle elections.

The Democrats' electoral success influenced their strategy in the third congressional race in New York. The first ad run by the democratic house majority PAC emphasised that Republican Mazi Pilip was "running on a party platform that calls for a ban on abortion." During the sole debate between Pilip and Democrat Tom Suozzi, Pilip attempted to explain a personal stance that clashed with the GOP's official stance. “I chose to be a mother of seven children. That was my choice. I’m not going to force my own belief to any woman,” she expressed, adding that she would not back a national abortion ban. 

“Are you saying you’re pro-choice?” asked Suozzi, who questioned how she could say abortion is a choice while not supporting laws to give women the ability to make their own decisions. “I am Mazi Pilip. I am pro-life. This is me,” she said in response. An Ethiopian-born Jewish immigrant, Pilip was someone who didn’t stink of MAGA coming into the special election, and perhaps could convince mainstream suburban voters into believing a more moderate GOP existed. (Though a visit from House Speaker and far-right zealot Mike Johnson probably didn’t help Pilip in the Nassau suburbs.) In the end, voters sent Suozzi back to Congress, further shrinking the GOP’s slim majority in the House. 

Surely, Trump sees the writing on the wall when it comes to abortion, which is why sources close to him floated that seemingly more palatable 16-week ban idea. The very next day, however, the Times published something closer to what Trump’s real abortion agenda would be if returning to the White House, reporting that the former president’s allies and “officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights if he returns to power that would go far beyond proposals for a national ban or the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.”

While Trump won’t publicly get behind this effort, Jonathan F. Mitchell, the architect of Texas’s SB 8 law, which functionally overturned Roe in the state, told the Times that “we don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books.” Republicans could seize upon the 1873 Comstock Act to make it illegal to send abortion pills by mail. “I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Mitchell told the Times. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.” Yes, even Mitchell has a sense of how deeply unpopular ending abortion is! According to the Times, second-term policies under consideration include “banning the use of fetal stem cells in medical research for diseases like cancer, rescinding approval of abortion pills at the F.D.A. and stopping hundreds of millions in federal funding for Planned Parenthood.”

Meanwhile, organizations trying to protect reproductive rights are feeling financially strapped with abortion on the ballot in a quarter of US states this November. We know abortion is a loser for Republicans, but if they’re able to talk their way around it, that could mean another Trump administration and the end of reproductive freedom in this country. It could mean the beginning of an FDA that is dictated by religious beliefs and not by scientific ones. Removing the FDA approval for Mifepristone (one of the medicines used to end pregnancy), for example, could open the door to removing FDA approval for all sorts of other drugs, on religious or ideological grounds. A second Trump term could look a lot like The Handmaid’s Tale, though sadly, it won’t be fiction.