WITH ELECTION SLIPPING AWAY, TRUMP BACKTRACKS ON ABORTION

By Jessica Piper

Politico

Donald Trump attempted to strike a new tone on the issue of abortion this week, saying he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights” — to the frustration of anti-abortion advocates.

The former president invoked the phrase in a post on Social Truth on Friday, reflecting 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.

Democrats frequently use the phrase “reproductive rights” as a stand-in for abortion but also to refer more broadly to a range of medical practices related to child-bearing, such as birth control and in vitro fertilization. Support for reproductive rights, when invoked by Democrats, almost always means support for access to abortion. In contrast, Republicans rarely talk about abortion in that way, and anti-abortion advocates quickly took notice of Trump’s tonal shift.

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“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump, the former president and front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, said on his social media platform.

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Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action, speaking on her podcast on Friday, criticized Trump for trying to “ingratiate himself with those that are pro-abortion” with his use of the phrase.

“Not only is it not principled, it’s not going to help the Trump campaign to be trying to sound like a Democrat right now,” Rose said.

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, said on X that the Truth Social post had “understandably upset many within the pro-life movement.” National Review editor Philip Klein wrote that in the battle over abortion, it “increasingly looks like Trump is joining the other side.”

Trump’s campaign suggested the Truth Social post was aligned with his previous positions on abortion and other reproductive issues.

“As President Trump has consistently stated, he supports the rights of individuals in their respective states to determine their laws on abortion. President Trump also strongly supports ensuring women have access to the care they need to create healthy families, including widespread access to IVF, birth control, and contraception, and he always will,” said Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s national press secretary.

The Truth Social post came after a week where Democrats repeatedly went after Trump on the issue of abortion at the Democratic National Convention, which featured stories of women who struggled to receive adequate health care in the post-Roe era. Harris, in her Thursday address, sought to tie restrictive state abortion laws directly to the former president, saying victims of sexual assault were being denied abortions “because of Donald Trump.”

But Trump has also repeatedly frustrated anti-abortion advocates over the course of his campaign by declining to go further in limiting abortion access. In an interview earlier this week, Trump said he would use the Comstock Act to ban mail delivery of abortion drugs, something anti-abortion advocates had pushed for. 

And earlier this year, he opted not to call for a nationwide abortion ban or restriction as some Republicans have advocated for, instead saying the question of legal abortion should continue to be decided at the state level.

Anti-abortion advocacy groups have backed Trump in spite of those disagreements, and the former president continues to describe the appointing of Supreme Court justices who would go on to overturn Roe v. Wade as one of the key achievements of his first administration.

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Trump campaigned in 2016 on eliminating Roe v. Wade, saying he would appoint “pro-life” judges who would overturn it. He made good on that promise by picking Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. All three were confirmed by a Republican-led Senate and, along with GOP appointees Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, made up the five-member Supreme Court majority that voted to overturn Roe.

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But Trump, who attended the March for Life as president, has also appeared mindful that the politics of abortion have shifted since Roe was overturned, particularly as the abortion rights side has won referendums even in red states in the past two years. He blamed anti-abortion advocates for the GOP’s 2022 midterm losses and his campaign pushed for language calling for a national abortion ban to be removed from the Republican Party's official platform, replacing it with language mirroring his own stated position that the issue should be left up to the states.

Trump has declined to say so far how he would vote in an upcoming referendum in his home state of Florida that would restore the right to abortion until viability, replacing the state’s current 6-week ban.