Donald Trump has taken a first crack at clarifying his stances on abortion and IVF.
Donald Trump has taken a first crack at clarifying his stances on abortion and IVF, saying in a video message this morning that abortion is a state issue while pledging support for IVF:
“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. In this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in the video. “Many states will be different. Many states will have a different number of weeks . . . at the end of the day it is all about the will of the people.” The former president went on to stipulate that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother.
Left out of most major media coverage of the statement, Trump also — quite properly — reminded voters that: “It must be remembered that the Democrats are the radical ones on this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months, and even execution after birth — and that’s exactly what it is. The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth — is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.” Trump may not be good at making moral arguments, but his meat-axe approach to rhetoric is warranted on this score.
If anything, Trump understates the radicalism of Democrats on abortion. They want abortion to be affirmatively subsidized and promoted by the federal and state governments; they want to eliminate conscience protections for doctors and nurses who object to performing abortions; they want to shield abortion from the sorts of regulation that govern any other medical procedure or even any other business; and, maybe most alarmingly, they aim to abolish legal protections against women being coerced into having abortion – giving the lie to the “pro-choice” label. In Minnesota, as soon as Democrats gained a one-seat majority in the state senate, they repealed the state’s law against coercing a woman to have an abortion. The prior law, struck out in 2023, had quite reasonably stated that “any person who receives compensation for services under any program receiving financial assistance under this section, who coerces or endeavors to coerce any person to undergo an abortion or sterilization procedure by threatening the person with the loss of or disqualification for the receipt of any benefit or service under a program receiving state or federal financial assistance shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
On abortion, Trump is half-right. National pro-life groups such as the Susan B. Anthony List argue that “Unborn children and their mothers deserve national protections and national advocacy from the brutality of the abortion industry,” and therefore, “We are deeply disappointed in President Trump’s position.” But as I have argued at length before, the right strategy for pro-lifers now should be to protect pro-life state laws from being repealed at the state level or overridden by the federal government, and secondarily to advocate for expanding such laws in other states. Right now, the movement has its hands more than full with the first task, and Trump hasn’t helped, branding a six-week ban “terrible” during the primaries. That was largely driven by Trump’s insistence on opposing everything done by Ron DeSantis in Florida, but it also reflected his political instinct to start abandoning pro-lifers. Trump is also calculating that pro-lifers effectively have nowhere else to go: Joe Biden and his party and his allies will continue to treat pro-lifers as enemies of the state and as “authoritarians” dangerous to “democracy, and every third party candidate out there is pro-abortion.
Even if Trump is now going to stick to his new re-reversal of course and stop demonizing pro-life state laws, however, just intoning “leave it to the states” doesn’t answer the question of what the federal executive branch can and will do on abortion. At a minimum, pro-lifers should want to see rolled back the various Biden administration legal initiatives and challenges to state abortion laws, as well as rolling back federal funding for abortion and the use of federal facilities to perform abortion. The federal government should take seriously the Comstock Act, which after all is an actual federal law, and that at least means stopping the use of interstate mails to send abortion pills into states where their use is illegal. There’s an array of agency decisions in the FDA and other agencies regarding abortion. The questions can’t all be finessed so easily. A framework of “life is national, abortion is local,” modeled on how the Republicans approached slavery in the 1850s, would be a better approach that allows for moral clarity while reassuring abortion supporters that the purpose of a pro-life administration is to take the federal thumb off the scales and let matters be actually decided at the state level.
Of course, to do any of that, Trump will need to hire competent, conservative people — which is very much in doubt.
As for IVF, pro-lifers probably lost the battle years ago when our society as a whole embraced the procedure (and its pro-family, pro-child goals) without much thought for the moral consequences of creating embryos with no plan to carry them to term, or much thought for the morality of then destroying them. After the Alabama supreme court’s decision, we’re likely now to move to a legal regime in which even the parents of those embryos won’t be allowed to object or seek damages if the embryos are destroyed without the parents’ consent — exactly what was at issue in that lawsuit. In any event, this isn’t the right battle for the movement now — it fails the eyeball test — and it would never have been realistic to expect Trump, of all people, to make a moral argument with no upside closer than the long-term horizons of the culture.