Donald Trump has never had a principled position on abortion. And pro-life activists always knew it.
But over the last week, their strange marriage of convenience threatened to come undone. And the more Trump talked, the worse things got.
Part of the reason for this unraveling is that the former president knows his campaign for reelection is in trouble. Polls now show him either tied with or behind Kamala Harris, and the momentum is heavily titled in her favor.
That Trump has not yet figured out how to right the ship is reflected in what he has said over the last week or so about reproductive rights. One day, he seems to be staking out a moderate and pragmatic position on abortion; the next, he seems to be doubling down on his opposition to it. This flip-flopping suggests the GOP nominee is not comfortable allying himself with the pro-life movement’s fervent desire to go beyond overturning Roe v. Wade by enacting a nationwide ban on all abortions — even though that reversal happened on his watch.
Trump's on again, off again position on reproductive rights is one of the reasons he faces an uphill climb to win enough support among women to ensure victory in November. While Trump leads Harris 54 percent to 45 percent among men, according to a recent CBS News poll, he loses to her among women 56 percent to 44 percent.
Harris gets a “higher vote share … among women who want abortion to be legal,” the report states. And 51 percent of voters say a candidate’s stance on abortion will be a “major factor” in determining who they will support in November.
In April, the Wall Street Journal said, “Abortion is the most powerful issue driving suburban women who could decide the presidential election.” A poll of seven battleground states found that “39% of suburban women cite abortion as a make-or-break issue for their vote—making it by far the most motivating issue for the group. Nearly three-quarters of them say the procedure should be legal … and a majority thinks Trump’s policies are too restrictive.”
Trump is not the only Republican who can’t seem to find his footing on the abortion issue. Many of them are, a Brookings study observes, “are thrashing around trying to get themselves out of the abortion ban they have tried to win for so many decades.”
“Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was the first,” Brookings continues. “In the fall of 2022, just months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, he proposed legislation calling for a national abortion ban after 15 weeks. So far, this bill has gone nowhere.”
But recently, Trump’s troubles on the abortion issue have taken on particular prominence — and upset some of his most fervent supporters.
On Thursday, he criticized Florida’s six-week abortion ban, which will be the subject of a referendum in November. “I think the six is too short; there has to be more time, and I’ve told them that. I want more weeks,” Trump said.
“Look,” he continued, “everyone wanted Roe v. Wade terminated for years. 52 years. I got it done. They wanted it to go back to the states.”
What Trump forgets (or is ignoring) is that many pro-life activists compare leaving the abortion issue to the states to the cowardly position of people who, before the Civil War, wanted to leave the issue of slavery to the states. As they argue, Trump’s opposition to a nationwide, six-week abortion ban erases “any recognition of that small creature in the womb, as one who might have the standing of a human being, and whose injuries ‘count.’”
Not surprisingly, the blow-back from pro-life activists was as intense as it was instantaneous.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said Trump’s Thursday stance “completely undermines his position. For anyone who believes in drawing a different line, they must vote… against Amendment 4, unless they don't want a line at all."
Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life in America, joined the chorus of pro-life criticism, claiming that Trump “clearly doesn't want to be pro-life anymore. ... Pro-lifers are being screwed.”
On Friday, Trump apparently got the message, and tried to walk back his comments. He said he would vote no on the Florida ballot measure, describing it as “radical” and falsely claiming that it would mean “you can do an abortion in the ninth month.”
Trump sounded even more insincere about his pro-life position when he said on Aug. 23 that “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” This startling pronouncement reflected what Politico called “his campaign’s frenzied attempt to reset the narrative in the race against Vice President Kamala Harris and present more moderately on the issue of abortion, which has plagued Republicans electorally since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.”
Coming from Trump, the phrase “reproductive rights” was jarring. While it is often used by Democrats “as a stand-in for abortion,” as Politico puts it, “Republicans rarely talk about abortion in that way.”
Trump dug the hole with pro-life activists even deeper with comments he made last week about in vitro fertilization treatments. He proudly observed, “I was always for IVF. Right from the beginning, as soon as we heard about it.”
That shocked many people in the pro-life community who oppose certain parts of the IVF process that involve discarding unused embryos. Trump went even further with his support for the expensive procedure, though, saying he’d support public funding for in vitro fertilization. “We’re doing this,” Trump said, “because we just think it’s great.”
But neither what he said about IVF nor about Florida’s six-week abortion ban should have shocked them.
As a report in the New York Times notes, Trump’s on-again, off-again abortion positions go back a long way. “At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ Donald J. Trump described himself as ‘very pro-choice.’ In 2011, without any explanation about the change, he informed a packed room at a conservative conference that he was now ‘pro-life.’”
Five years later, during his first presidential campaign, he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that “he would even support punishments for women who got abortions.”
Trump spent last week “once again tying himself in knots” to satisfy his pro-life allies while also trying to navigate his increasingly precarious electoral political position. If they needed the reminder, his pro-life supporters should now see clearly that he will say or do anything to regain political power.
As they try to figure out what to do with the former president in November, they should recall the old admonition, “Let the buyer beware.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.
