Has the GOP Moderated on Abortion?

No. They've just gotten better at lying about it.

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

If you’re reading the news this week, you may have read that the Republican Party platform includes a much more moderate position on abortion than in years prior, and also affirms a commitment to protecting contraception and IVF access. You’ve read right — but if your takeaway is “the GOP has moderated on abortion,” you’ve understood wrong.

The fact that the Republican Party even has a platform this year and not simply a statement of loyalty to Dear Leader is a step forward. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, is something of a unique candidate in that he has very few actual policy positions, and really only four areas of interest when it comes to governing: Immigration (none), crime (crack down), the economy (restrict trade with China and spend away), and executive power (maximize it). He’s not a details guy; he is not that interested in the nuts and bolts of day-to-day governance. He wants power, praise, and a big wooden desk.

One issue he absolutely does not care about: Abortion.

However, his party and its voters care about abortion, and so Trump has to pretend that he has any real investment in the issue. This was all fine in 2016, when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land and the abortion wars were fairly straightforward: Conservative states would pass restrictive laws; millions and millions in taxpayer money would be spent as those laws wended their way through the courts, often getting struck down, sometimes making abortion harder to access for poor women in particular, but never actually banning abortion outright; rinse and repeat. Abortion remained broadly legal, and so the GOP could campaign on outlawing it, and the people who wanted to see that happen would vote Republican and those who didn’t want that to happen could delude themselves into thinking it wouldn’t.

The Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe and ended the era of legal abortion in America, also ended this dysfunctional if predictable pattern. And voters are very, very angry, because it turns out that while people may not love the concept of abortion, they really hate a bunch of smarmy misogynists telling them that they must bear children against their will — especially when that means not giving pregnant women adequate treatment in the emergency room, making sure women lose their uteruses from totally treatable miscarriage complications, and threatening to curtail IVF and contraception. Abortion, many Americans are realizing, is more complicated than they perhaps thought it was, and outlawing it is having broadly negative effects that many hadn’t anticipated. Anti-abortion groups, which certainly did anticipate these negative effects, don’t care. Some members of the Republican Party, though, do care, at least insofar they see that this issue is absolutely killing them at the ballot box.

Trump is one of those Republicans. He is happy to deliver for anti-abortion groups, and did when he appointed three right-wing anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court. Again, it’s not that the guy is secretly pro-choice; it’s that he truly does not care at all about abortion rights either way, and anti-abortion groups were useful in getting him elected. Now, though, those same groups are putting his candidacy at risk. 2024 is not 2016. Trump is adjusting accordingly. And one big adjustment is on abortion, which he wants Republicans to just quit talking about — for now. Once he’s in office, though, the calculus is different.