Column: Why Trump’s ‘leave it to the states’ abortion stance ties him in knots
Watching Donald Trump regularly twist himself into a pretzel to reach a politically safe position on abortion rights would be comical if the issue weren’t so serious for the lives of countless women.
In any case, his political gymnastics are doomed; Trump can’t stick this landing. He is, after all, the former president whose three Supreme Court appointees made possible the decidedly unpopular Dobbs ruling, which two years ago overturned what had been a constitutional right for women for a half-century. Democrats have reaped electoral benefits ever since, and this year looks no different.
But Trump thought he’d struck just the right stance in April. That’s when he released a 4½-minute video in which he asserted that abortion policy was now up to each of the separate states. Months later he still rotely repeats that line like a mantra, as if what a prospective president thinks doesn’t matter. Next question. (So much for “I alone can fix it.”)
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
“The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue and it’s being solved at the state level. And people are very happy about it,” he told a CBS News reporter last month.
Except “it” isn’t being solved, and people aren’t happy.
That inconvenient truth could do as much as anything to keep Trump from winning another term in the White House. His flip-flopping is only making his situation worse: He has enraged his antiabortion base as well as abortion rights supporters by his efforts to wash his hands of the issue. The latter are champing at the bit to vote against him; the former could become demoralized enough to stay home. Trump is “suppressing his own support,” as one evangelical leader said.
Through half a century of death threats and derision, Warren Hern has never stopped providing women with critically needed healthcare.
Trump’s facile states-rights line doesn’t cut it when he’s asked about the latest total or near-ban in a Republican-run state, the latest antiabortion ruling from a Trump-appointed federal judge or the latest horror story about a pregnant woman who nearly died after she was denied a needed abortion.
Trump’s mantra makes no sense when not only state courts but federal courts are being asked to rule on legal issues spawned in the Dobbs fallout. In June, the Supreme Court unanimously set aside rulings from a Trump district judge in Texas and a conservative appeals court taking aim at the abortion drug mifepristone. The justices ruled on a technicality, however, and Republican officials in three red states are pursuing another challenge against the drug that is now used for nearly two-thirds of abortions.
And Trump’s “it’s up to the states” doesn’t satisfy his erstwhile antiabortion allies now demanding a federal ban. They are infuriated that blue states are strengthening their abortion rights, including protections for doctors and others who help women from other states get abortions, and they know that women in states with bans are getting abortion drugs by mail.
Trump can’t duck the abortion issue. It is a federal matter. Still, he tries, making a fool of himself.
The Supreme Court rejects an abortion appeal from Oklahoma regarding referrals at federally funded family-planning facilities.
He continues to boast that he ended Roe with his Supreme Court picks, yet two weeks ago claimed that a second Trump administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” As president in 2018, he lauded House Republicans for voting to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and months ago he mused about backing a national ban after 15 weeks or maybe 16 weeks, but now he wants us to believe he’d never sign such a bill. He insists that Republicans support IVF treatments — last week he even proposed that the government or insurers should foot the bill — yet some Trump-loving states now have “personhood” laws giving embryos legal status, imperiling IVF practices. Democrats are the extreme party, he lies, because they even support “execution after birth.”
And last week, after months of evasion, Trump said he’d vote for a ballot measure in his home state of Florida that would restore abortion rights, then switched the next day, after conservatives’ backlash, to oppose it. If the measure fails, Florida would retain a near-total ban on abortion after six-weeks gestation, when some women don’t yet know they’re pregnant. Only last spring, he’d called the Florida law “a terrible mistake” for being too extreme and politically risky.
UC Davis law professor and historian Mary Ziegler has become one of the country’s leading authorities on the abortion issue. She sees a push-pull between judges, anti-abortion lawmakers and Americans who by and large favor abortion rights.
Not for nothing did NBC News post an article earlier this year headlined “A timeline of Trump’s many, many positions on abortion.” It went from his 1999 claim to be “very pro-choice,” through his “I am pro-life” profession at a conservative conference in 2011 and his 2016 contention, quickly rescinded, that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions, and all the way through his current gyrations.
In April, he twice told Time magazine that in two weeks he’d propose how to regulate mifepristone; that policy paper must be lost with the anti-Obamacare health-insurance alternative he’s promised “in two weeks” for years. In May he told a Pittsburgh TV interviewer he’d “very shortly” announce restrictions on contraceptives; very shortly he backtracked.
As Kamala Harris says, Trump is an unserious man, but his election would have extremely serious consequences. He is the epitome of male politicians who oppose abortion rights purely for politics, without a thought to the real-life ramifications for women. He was a proudly promiscuous peacock for decades, grabbing women by another p-word, and if we’re to believe Stormy Daniels — I do — he wouldn’t use a condom. Responsibility is only for women.
Well, then, the responsible thing for women to do now, along with men who support them, is to keep Trump from ever again being described as that other p-word: president.
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