Don't fall for Trump's new abortion position claims
Trump's purported abortion position is unrealistic, unworkable, and unpopular. He's just saying it because he wants to win. He told us as much in the video.
While once again taking credit for the end of Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion, Donald Trump nonetheless tried to distance himself on Monday from the most extreme anti-abortion positions of his party in an explicit effort to “win elections.”
The purported abortion position Trump peddled in a video posted Monday on Truth Social — after avoiding laying out his position throughout the primary — is unrealistic, unworkable, and unpopular. Don’t fall for it.
In typical word salad, Trump announced, “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it, from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land, or, in this case, the law of the state.”
The problems with that are manifold. First, that’s not what Justice Sam Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization said.1 The court in June 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion; it did not limit the possibility of federal legislation or executive actions.
Second, Trump’s claimed position is not what Trump’s party wants. Regardless of Trump’s personal — or even political — position on abortion, Trump is running for president as the leader of a party whose position on abortion is moving further and further right as Americans of all parties make clear that their position on abortion and reproductive rights is significantly to the left of both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republican Party.
Right now, a majority of Republicans in Congress support an argument that could lead to an effective nationwide abortion ban without the passage of any new legislation. That is a fact.
In a brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year, 145 Republicans expressed the view that the Comstock Act — an 1873 law — criminalizes any mailing of abortion drugs, contrary to the views of courts that have interpreted it and the Biden administration. Submitted in the case over mifepristone access, the lawmakers specifically targeted the administration’s 2021 decision ending the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone — allowing it to be prescribed and sent via mail.
“The FDA’s 2021 action sanctions the shipment of abortion drugs, including through mail-order pharmacies, which violates longstanding federal laws,” the brief stated, adding, “These provisions have been federal policy for more than a century.”
Although he is not on the brief, House Speaker Mike Johnson had joined an earlier and even more extreme letter led by Sen. James Lankford in January 2023 challenging the administration’s position.
“These criminal prohibitions regarding the distribution of abortion drugs are enforceable,” the letter stated of the Comstock Act. “It is disappointing, yet not surprising, that the Biden administration’s DOJ has not only abdicated its Constitutional responsibility to enforce the law, but also has once again twisted the plain meaning of the law in an effort to promote the taking of unborn life.” In summary, they stated, “[T]hese longstanding Federal mail-order abortion laws continue to be ‘the supreme law of the land.’”
Then, they lay out their view of the proper interpretation of the law:
This extreme viewpoint is shared by more than 40 Republicans in Congress, including several being discussed as potential running mates for the 77-year-old Trump. Moreover, this is not some hidden letter that I had sought out. The brief submitted in the mifepristone case cites to this letter approvingly.
Further still, nothing in the law itself limits itself to drugs. “Every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion … [i]s declared to be nonmailable matter,” per the law. Although the brief doesn’t say so, other aligned lawyers and advocates have already been pushing for this law to be used as a way of creating a nationwide abortion ban because, of course, virtually every “article or thing” used in even a surgical abortion is, at some point, mailed.
In other words, the majority of congressional Republicans are seeking an interpretation of the Comstock Act that allies are already urging be used in a second Trump administration to allow nationwide restrictions on mailing anything used in abortion — effectively, a nationwide abortion ban.
This is just one of many ways in which the Republican Party is fighting for a nation in which states do not get to “determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both” how abortion should be regulated. It is important to consider, in detail, just how far removed Trump’s claimed position on Monday is from Republican reality.
Even if it were a realistic position, moreover, we have already seen — in Alabama, Ohio, and Texas, among other places — that Trump’s claimed position is neither workable in the country nor is it a position that the majority of people consider acceptable. Trump’s claimed support for IVF contained no specifics and left itself open to many of the limits supported by the Alabama Supreme Court justices in their opinions in that state’s IVF case that raised an uproar even in Alabama and led to the legislative action he highlighted. Similarly, the hollowness of Trump’s claimed support for “exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother“ is seen in the Texas case involving Kate Cox and the broader fight over Texas and other states’ abortion ban exceptions.
Voters, too, have consistently been pushing back — including in Kansas and Ohio, states that voted for Trump in both in 2016 and 2020.
Trump, I imagine, doesn’t really care about abortion. All evidence, however, suggests that Trump also doesn’t care about women. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that he would say what he thinks he needs to say about abortion because he wants to be elected president again to save himself from legal and financial jeopardy.
Trump’s re-election bid will be on the ballot along with abortion votes in many states, including Florida. Additionally, the Supreme Court will be issuing rulings in multiple abortion-related cases in the coming months, including in the case over mifepristone access.
Trump knows abortion will be on the ballot, he wants to win, and he also knows — and the far right knows — that he will be able govern as he wishes should he win.
He told us as much in his video.
“Always go by your heart, but we must win,” Trump said.
Believe him.
In the video, Trump thanked six justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, for “having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.” In Dobbs, Roberts actually disagreed with the other five Republican appointees who overturned Roe, writing that he “would take a more measured course.”
This is NOT A "NEW" POSITION for Trump. He has long acknowledged that Roe v Wade was a bad decision and rightly was overturned...which returned the issue to the STATES. It's no surprise to hear him say that this is as it "should be."
Not that this isn't more than bad enough, but Comstock also applies to many forms of contraception, since these groups claim they are 'abortifacients', and all laws in this area are governed by legislators' imaginations rather than any kind of scientific or medical fact. Of course Comstock's broad application to 'obscenity' would be interpreted very differently by the Christian Nationalists the Republicans are empowering, compared to how anyone else would understand it.