CHICAGO — Former President Donald Trump has sought to take credit for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade while simultaneously distancing himself from calls for further restricted abortion access at the federal level backed by a number of Republican lawmakers.
The former president’s insistence that abortion should be a state matter has risen to some frustration among the anti-abortion bloc, who largely expect a Republican presidential nominee to fully embrace federal efforts to restrict abortion access.
Instead, Trump, who told reporters in August that abortion won’t be a “big factor” in November, vowed on Aug. 19 not to use the 150-year-old Comstock Act to ban shipping abortion medications through the mail, a position previously championed by his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).
In April, Trump said he would not, if elected to a second term in the White House, sign a national abortion ban into law, which Vance reaffirmed during a Sunday interview on NBC News’s Meet the Press.
And on Aug. 23, the former president wrote on social media that his “administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
Still, Democrats are warning that Trump’s promises to leave abortion policy up to the states are simply the former president looking to shore up an electoral liability ahead of the general election.
A senior Democratic strategist with close ties to Vice President Kamala Harris‘s 2024 campaign told the Washington Examiner that Trump’s vacillation on abortion will hurt him with both women and the anti-abortion movement.
“This seems so blatantly obvious it almost doesn’t bear mentioning, but Donald Trump cannot be trusted — on abortion, or any other issue,” the strategist said. “He’s just covering his a** because this is clearly a losing issue for him, and, in doing so, he’s pissing off a big chunk of his own base.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, appeared to agree with the latter part of this sentiment.
“It is not a pro-life position, it’s not an acceptable position, and it does not provide the contrast on this issue to the degree that we have had in the past between him and Kamala Harris,” he said of Trump’s resistance to using the Comstock Act to restrict abortion medication access. “What President Trump is doing is suppressing his own support.”
The Harris campaign itself is claiming women won’t trust the Republican ticket’s latest abortion promises “because they’ve already seen what Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have done.”
“Trump ripped away women’s freedoms in all 50 states by overturning Roe, and he is ‘proud’ that millions of women are nearly dying in parking lots, live in states with no exceptions for rape and incest, and are losing their access to IVF because of what he did as president,” Harris campaign spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika told the Washington Examiner. “If they win this November, Trump and Vance will use their Project 2025 playbook to ban abortion without Congressional approval, restrict access to birth control, and appoint a national anti-abortion czar to force states to report women’s miscarriages. Vice President Harris said it best: ‘They are out of their minds’ — and voters know it.’”
Harris and Democrats chose to put abortion rights front and center at the 2024 Democratic National Convention this past week, which was a stark contrast to Trump, whose own positions on the subject run contrary to those of many of his supporters.
Virtually every speaker at the Democratic National Convention highlighted the fight for reproductive rights as a core pillar of Harris’s campaign platform. Multiple women shared their personal abortion stories both before and after the Supreme Court struck down Roe in 2022.
One such woman was Hadley Duvall of Kentucky, who described in graphic detail her experience of being raped and impregnated by her stepfather at the age of 12.
“What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?” Duvall posed to the crowd. “There are other survivors out there who have no options, and I want you to know that we see you, we hear you.”
Harris earned arguably her loudest applause yet from the crowd during her Thursday night acceptance speech while reiterating her plan to sign legislation codifying Roe into law and claiming Trump and Republicans are “out of their minds” for trying to install new abortion bans.
We’re on Michigan Ave. & Wacker Drive — We’ve got some ladies dressed as Misoprostol, a medication used for abortion. There’s a group of demonstrators protesting a variety of causes. pic.twitter.com/TFwRWaQjJf
— Samantha-Jo Roth (@SamanthaJoRoth) August 18, 2024
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said Sunday that “American women are not stupid, and we are not going to trust the futures of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country.”
“Don’t buy it? Just read it. J.D. Vance actually sent a letter last year to the Department of Justice saying, ‘enforce the Comstock Act.’ And remember, he did that, and then Donald Trump picked him to be his vice president,” she said during an interview with NBC News.
Deiadra Queary, a Democratic delegate from Wisconsin, told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that abortion will be a “major issue” despite the former president’s claims.
“It is an issue, whatever word they use to disguise it. It is the right for a woman to govern herself without somebody telling her what to do, and until someone has lived it, walked it, they can’t speak on it and have no right to govern us,” she said in an interview. “It is limiting our freedom. It is telling me what to do. Nobody should be able to do that. Nobody can do that.”
Democratic Florida delegate Nikki Barnes pointed to her home state’s abortion amendment that will be on the ballot in November, a matter Trump has avoided addressing how he plans to vote on, as evidence that Republicans are overstepping.
“When you eliminate abortion, you take away access to other medications that treat other things. We are not breeding grounds for the next population, right,” she told the Washington Examiner. “We have a choice, and today — I have two daughters. One that’s 19, one that’s 11 — to think they have less rights now, probably my 19 year old, than I had at 19 years old is ridiculous. So yes, if you don’t like abortion, don’t ever get one, but please mind your business.”
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Attorney Gloria Allred also described to the Washington Examiner having to have “an illegal abortion in California when it was a crime.” She said Democrats’ messaging is “also appealing to men who love women, who care about women.”
“My lesson that I learned is that abortion has to be legal, safe, affordable, and available, which it’s not now,” she said. “We are taking our power back.”