This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.
If you’re reading the news, you may have read that the Republican Party platform includes a much more moderate position on abortion than in years prior, and also affirms a commitment to protecting contraception and IVF access. You’ve read right—but if your takeaway is “the GOP has moderated on abortion,” you’ve understood wrong.
The fact that the Republican Party even has a platform this year and not simply a statement of loyalty to Dear Leader is a step forward. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, is something of a unique candidate in that he has very few actual policy positions, and really only four areas of interest when it comes to governing:
- immigration (none)
- crime (crack down)
- the economy (restrict trade with China and spend away), and
- executive power (maximize it).
He’s not a details guy; he is not that interested in the nuts and bolts of day-to-day governance. He wants power, praise and a big wooden desk.
One issue he absolutely does not care about: abortion.
However, his party and its voters care about abortion, and so Trump has to pretend that he has any real investment in the issue.
This was all fine in 2016, when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land and the abortion wars were fairly straightforward: Conservative states would pass restrictive laws; millions and millions in taxpayer money would be spent as those laws wended their way through the courts, often getting struck down, sometimes making abortion harder to access for poor women in particular, but never actually banning abortion outright; rinse and repeat. Abortion remained broadly legal, and so the GOP could campaign on outlawing it, and the people who wanted to see that happen would vote Republican and those who didn’t want that to happen could delude themselves into thinking it wouldn’t.
Abortion, many Americans are realizing, is more complicated than they perhaps thought it was, and outlawing it is having broadly negative effects that many hadn’t anticipated.
The Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe and ended the era of legal abortion in America, also ended this dysfunctional if predictable pattern. And voters are very, very angry, because it turns out that while people may not love the concept of abortion, they really hate a bunch of smarmy misogynists telling them that they must bear children against their will—especially when that means not giving pregnant women adequate treatment in the emergency room, making sure women lose their uteruses from totally treatable miscarriage complications, and threatening to curtail IVF and contraception.
Abortion, many Americans are realizing, is more complicated than they perhaps thought it was, and outlawing it is having broadly negative effects that many hadn’t anticipated. Anti-abortion groups, which certainly did anticipate these negative effects, don’t care. Some members of the Republican Party, though, do care, at least insofar they see that this issue is absolutely killing them at the ballot box.
Trump is one of those Republicans. He is happy to deliver for anti-abortion groups, and did when he appointed three right-wing anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court. Again, it’s not that the guy is secretly pro-choice; it’s that he truly does not care at all about abortion rights either way, and anti-abortion groups were useful in getting him elected.
Now, though, those same groups are putting his candidacy at risk. 2024 is not 2016. Trump is adjusting accordingly. And one big adjustment is on abortion, which he wants Republicans to just quit talking about—for now. Once he’s in office, though, the calculus is different.
The 2024 GOP platform reflects Trump’s primary desire, which is to win. It only uses the word “abortion” one time—a departure from the much more hellfire-and-brimstone abortion obsession in previous platforms (in the 2016 platform, “abortion” came up 35 times). It emphasizes the Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise that no one can be deprived of life or liberty without due process, and says that states may therefore regulate abortion as they see fit. But it does not propose a federal ban, as it has in past years. It claims to support access to prenatal care, birth control, and IVF.
This would be a step forward, if it were true. But as I wrote for CNN.com this week, the proof that it’s a lie is out there for all of us to see.
- Republicans in Congress have proposed federal abortion bans, including ones that would criminalize contraception and IVF.
- When given the opportunity to vote to protect IVF and contraception, Republicans have refused.
- Republicans currently control all the governorship and both legislative houses in more than a dozen states, and have passed abortion bans in most of them.
What these same Republican-controlled states have not done: expanded prenatal care or protected access to contraception and IVF. Instead, several of them have laid the groundwork to eventually curtailing or even outlawing contraception and IVF.
None of the states that have banned abortion and forced women to have children have also turned themselves into pro-woman or pro-child states, the kinds of places where mothers are supported and children cared for: They have not instituted paid parental leave, or universal childcare, or even adequate healthcare for women and children. Anti-abortion states continue to have among the nation’s highest rates of child poverty and infant and maternal mortality. They are often where children and mothers and people generally do the worst: Where they die younger, where they live with more hardship and disease, where they are the poorest and the least healthy.
This is not some random set of outcomes; the red state neglect of women and children is part and parcel to the red state obsession with forcing women to have children against their will. It’s not about life. It’s about control—and immiseration.
(As an aside, conservative states also tend to have far worse schools and educational opportunities than more liberal ones—a fact that may be manifesting in the GOP platform, which, judging by the volume of randomly capitalized words alone, does not appear to have been copyedited.)
One crucial thing to understand about the GOP is that while there are some ideological lines even Trump can’t cross—some degree of opposition to abortion being one of them—Republican voters are much more malleable and manipulatable than previously believed. Trump has proven that much: I mean, remember when the national deficit was an issue GOP voters claimed to care about? Or spending? Or public decency?
Trump doesn’t care about abortion, but he also doesn’t care about the Republican Party. He has made no effort to make MAGA anything other than a movement that demands nearly religious devotion to a single man, not a broader party or even set of ideas. He has groomed no successor and mentored no heir apparent; he has instead undermined anyone he believes may steal the tiniest bit of his spotlight.
And so it will not matter to him if he torpedos what’s left of the GOP’s credibility once in office. Which is to say that, once he wins and actually has to issue executive orders or sign legislation related to abortion, it’s not going to matter to him if what he orders or signs is consistent with the GOP platform and the position he’s putting forward now. What will matter is less what Trump says he wants now and more what those around him will want once he’s in office—and what he believes to be politically expedient at any given moment.
Once getting elected is no longer an issue, all incentives will point to facilitating more extreme abortion laws. And you can bet that, no matter what Trump says, this is how the anti-abortion movement will dedicate its time and resources.
Trump and his Republican Party believe their voters are stupid and gullible, because so far, their voters have behaved in pretty stupid and gullible ways, going along with whatever Trump says no matter how evil, deranged or nonsensical.
Trump also realizes that extreme anti-abortion voters have nowhere else to go: They’re already a tiny minority of the American electorate and they hold a radical minority view. The Democratic Party isn’t going to cater to a bunch of right-wing nutters on an issue that unites most Americans and is an easy win for Democrats. Republicans long have embraced not just this minority abortion position but the entire concept of minority rule. They may, on paper, be moving away from the most extreme abortion stance. But they aren’t moving away from their aim of an extremist few ruling the many—and from there, they can and will do whatever they please.
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