Abortion may be the biggest threat to Donald Trump’s political comeback. Like an albatross he personally helped set loose. Now he’s trying to wriggle from its clutches.
The former president has released his long-awaited statement on abortion policy and its evident objective is to defuse this as an election issue.
It consists of two parts: Leave abortion decisions to individual states, and warn those states that adopting a total ban is a political loser.
So even as he took credit for ending the constitutional right to an abortion, and as he applauded the judges he appointed for doing so in 2022, Trump asked his party to be pragmatic.
He urged states to be lenient in cases of rape, or incest, or when an abortion might save the life of the mother, unlike the more severe bans already in effect in several states.
“You must follow your heart on this issue, But remember: You must also win elections,” Trump said in a video he released Monday.
Abortion bans unpopular
The political math behind Trump’s position is obvious.
Americans mostly dislike the abortion bans that have been unleashed across the U.S. South and elsewhere in more than a dozen states since the 2022 Supreme Court decision.
Since then, Democrats have been outperforming expectations in byelections, midterm elections and referendums on the issue.
By a 26-point gap, Pew Research found last year that Americans would rather see abortion be legal in all or most cases, than see it be illegal.
In this tight presidential race, Trump would rather have voters focused on his own favoured issues: inflation and the porous southern border.
There’s no guarantee his gambit will work.
A plethora of factors will keep pushing abortion back into the news, and onto the president’s desk: ongoing court cases, complex federal-state issues, referendums and personal anecdotes.
It’s disingenuous for Trump now to dissociate himself from the consequences of his own decision to appoint anti-abortion judges, said a lawyer who works on the issue.
Trump’s position ‘utter garbage,’ says advocate
“This is the president who let the horse out of the barn. Let it run away. And now he’s saying, ‘Maybe next year I’ll buy you a pony.’ It is utter garbage,” said Julie F. Kay, lawyer, author and executive director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access.
Trump, she says, is trying to make voters forget this is an election issue.
For example, the president gets to appoint the leaders of U.S. agencies that affect access to abortion medication: like the Food and Drug Administration (which approves it and allows it to be prescribed online) and the U.S. Postal Service (which allows it to be shipped into anti-abortion states).
The issue is a potential vote-driver. And not just in the presidential race.
There are also myriad elections this fall at the state level — for politicians, judges, prosecutors and attorneys general; there are also referendums planned, including in presidential swing states, and in states that could decide control of Congress.
“Every election is important around abortion rights in this day and age,” Kay said. “But this one in particular is very important.”
Ongoing court cases
Meanwhile, there are also ongoing court cases. The Supreme Court just heard one and will hear another.
Anti-abortion activists are trying to overturn federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, although in a recent hearing the judges sounded unlikely to agree.
The court will soon hear a case from Idaho about whether emergency-room doctors can refuse to perform abortions in an emergency.
U.S. Supreme Court justices heard arguments in a case that could limit access to the commonly used abortion drug mifepristone. Since the pandemic, more doctors have dispensed the drug through telemedicine but anti-abortion activists want that stopped.
Meanwhile, some Supreme Court judges have mused aloud that shipments of the abortion pill could be halted under the 151-year-old Comstock Act: the 1873 anti-pornography law forbids mailing “lewd, lascivious” materials.
“It sounds as antiquated as my grandmother’s corset,” said Kay, expressing disbelief that this is even up for discussion.
As for the Idaho emergency-room case, she said it’s not an ER doctor’s business: “Their job is to save lives and people’s health. Not judge them. Not like, you know, ‘If you were drunk driving, I’m not gonna treat you because I’m so opposed to this.’ “
Then there are individual cases.
Texas woman appears in Biden ad
Like a Texas woman who had a miscarriage and couldn’t get an abortion afterward. She nearly died and fears she’ll never conceive again because of damage to her reproductive system.
She’s now in a Joe Biden campaign video. It was first aired on Monday, after Trump made his abortion announcement.
WATCH | Biden campaign ad featuring Texas woman’s story:
It’s a raw, emotional ad. In it, Amanda Zurawski starts weeping as she shows off some of the items she purchased for her baby, while screen captions tell her story.
The ad concludes with: “Donald Trump did this,” referring to the abortion bans that swept across U.S. states, including 14 total statewide bans.
Will Trump succeed at nullifying the issue? The answer could very well decide the 2024 presidential election.
His move Monday elicited mixed reactions from his own side. Some moderate Republicans were pleased. His former vice-president, Mike Pence, was not, calling it a slap in the face to religious conservatives, like him, who supported Trump.
On the left, there were complaints about the news media giving Trump exactly what he wanted out of this: A favourable headline.
Abortion, immigration will swing votes: Pollster
One pollster calls abortion a particularly thorny issue for Republicans. As immigration is for Democrats.
“Those two issues will draw the most blood,” said Tim Malloy, an analyst for Quinnipiac University polls.
His own polls suggest a mere three per cent of Americans identify abortion as their top election issue, far behind the economy, immigration and preserving democracy.
But he says it remains more electorally potent than that number suggests.
He credited it for Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterms, when they defied polls to hold the U.S. Senate, nearly hold the House and gain in state legislatures.
Abortion will stay in the news, Malloy predicted. As an example, he pointed to two court decisions in Florida just rendered on the same day.
One will trigger a six-week abortion ban in the state on May 1. Another will allow a referendum to change the state constitution to guarantee abortion access.
It will be on the ballot this fall, down the very same ballot as the presidential vote. It’s given Democrats new hope that they might be competitive in a state they’ve recently written off.
“The right to choose is, I would think, the most visceral issue in America and the overturning [of] Roe v. Wade set fire to it,” Malloy said.
“The fire’s still burning.”
In a video on his social media site Truth Social, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said abortion legislation should be left up to the states. U.S. President Joe Biden was swift to respond, vowing to restore Roe v. Wade if re-elected in November.