What Trump Means For: Reproductive Rights

Abortion bans, contraception bans, bans on the term "gender equality"

Welcome to “What Trump Means For,” a multi-part series I’ll be publishing over the next several weeks as the 2024 election creeps closer. I’ll break down what Donald Trump and his current and probable future teams have said about how they will govern and exactly what they will do while in office. If Trump wins, he may not accomplish everything he pledges to do. But he will no doubt do a lot — and it’s worth taking seriously what he says and plans.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has tried to rebrand himself as an abortion moderate. He succeeded in getting the Republican Party to slash its abortion stance down to the absolute minimum necessary to keep the anti-abortion base from mutinying. During his 90-minute RNC speech, he didn’t mention or even allude to abortion. He has said he doesn’t support a national abortion ban. He has said he wants to leave the issue to the states, and that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the pregnant woman.

Donald Trump says a lot of things.

Trump has, in other contexts, signaled support for a national abortion ban. When he was running the first time around, he said he supported not only criminalizing abortion, but criminally punishing women who have abortions. He promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and end the era of legal abortion in the US, and that’s exactly what he did. He has called himself the nation’s most pro-life president ever. He has kept anti-abortion groups and their leaders close, and there is no question that, if he wins, they will be shaping his agenda in 2025 and beyond.

The thing to understand about Trump and reproductive rights is that he truly, deeply does not care. There are issues he cares about, and they’re the greatest hits you hear at his rallies: Immigration, crime, the economy. He knows abortion is a biggie for the GOP base, and so he’s anti-abortion.

But he also understands, better than most Republicans, that the game has changed since 2016 and 2020. With the end of abortion rights no longer theoretical but actually here in more than a dozen Republican-run states, the American people are getting schooled in what it’s actually like to live under pro-life rule. And it turns out it’s pretty brutal and pretty bad. Only about 1 in 10 Americans agree that abortion should be outlawed in all circumstances, and yet that’s historically the position of every large anti-abortion organization as well as the GOP. Before the Dobbs decision, a lot of Americans assumed they could avoid the abortion issue, or even told pollsters they were pro-life because, well, they didn’t really like the idea of abortion and it made them uncomfortable. After Dobbs, though, abortion became about something other than the personal ick factor. It became about personal freedoms; about women not bleeding out in hospital parking lots; about healthcare; about the government staying out of our most intimate decisions. Voters, including many conservatives and Republicans, really do not like the Republican position on abortion.

The Republican response to that reality has largely been “too bad.” They’ve pushed through wildly unpopular abortion bans, and taken wildly unpopular anti-abortion cases to court — cases that are so fringe and toxic that even the abortion-hostile conservative justices of the Supreme Court have punted on them. Trump’s response has been different, and frankly smarter. His view? Shut up.

Trump isn’t urging the GOP to actually moderate on abortion. He is urging them to shut their pie-holes for the next few months to allow him to get back into office. Once he’s there, he’ll be a one-term president who does not need to get reelected, and because he is a deep narcissist who has turned the GOP into a cult of personality revolving around one man, doesn’t care about any Republican successor getting reelected. He wants to consolidate his power. He wants to be revered.

And the people who are going to help him do that also want to see abortion rights vastly curtailed. Trump will reward them — and why not? Once he’s in office, he has nothing to lose. And given that he doesn’t actually give a damn about abortion, he’s happy to let the people who are enabling him get their way when it comes to reproductive rights. Here’s what that could look like: