Trump's abortion stance

It's wobbly.

Due to the echo chamber that is the hallmark of the modern right, they got high on their own supply and convinced themselves the nation wanted Roe gone as badly as they did.

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Abortion rights are resoundingly, durably popular. Pew Research has surveyed Americans on the issue since 1995, and support for abortion being legal in all or most cases has fallen below 50 percent just once, back in 2009. Pew’s most recent research shows that 63 percent of Americans — including 41 percent of Republicans — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The Associated Press found that in June 2021, before Roe’s demise, roughly half of Americans thought abortion should be legal for any reason. That jumped to approximately 60 percent in the last two years.

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A New York Times poll conducted last month found that women under 45 report that abortion is now the most critical issue to them, eclipsing even the economy.

  Public Notice

As well it should be. The economy for them is coupled to the size of their family.

A functioning political party led by someone with actual policy goals might consider recalibrating their stance on this issue in order to find a more electable middle ground. Or, a functioning political party could simply dig in, fully embracing the anti-choice side and hoping that the party base would turn out in ample enough numbers. But this is the GOP, and Trump is Trump, so they’ve instead settled on a mishmash of lies and backtracking and are hoping that carries the day.

Trump’s problem with abortion is personally acute because he lives in Florida, which is one of 10 states with an abortion question on the ballot.

Florida’s ballot measure would amend the state constitution by adding a provision stating that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” This would have the effect of invalidating the state’s current six-week abortion ban, which has been in effect since May. The amendment has strong support, with 69 percent of Florida voters surveyed in July saying they would vote for it.

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At the time of Roe, fetal viability was pegged at roughly 28 weeks, but by the time of another landmark abortion rights decision nearly 30 years later [with medical advancements for premature babies], the Supreme Court allowed abortion restrictions to begin around 23-24 weeks.

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Florida’s current six-week ban is a fetal heartbeat law, banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. But what is detected at six weeks is nothing but electrical impulses, as the valves that create a “heartbeat” don’t even exist yet.

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The Florida Supreme Court had previously ruled, back in 1989, that the privacy clause found in the state’s constitution explicitly protected abortion. But earlier this year, in letting the six-week ban go into effect, the court decided it had been wrong all along in how it interpreted the privacy clause, and magically, it no longer protected abortion.

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When first asked by NBC last Thursday about how he would vote on the amendment, given he is a Florida resident, he confusingly declared, “I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time.”

He also said, "I told them that I want more weeks. [...] I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.dd" No. No, he's not. Because how many weeks he wants isn't on the ballot.

That same day, Trump’s campaign issued a “clarification” that he had not yet said how he would vote on the ballot initiative but that six weeks is too short for a ban. The next day, though, during a friendly chat with a Fox News correspondent, Trump declared that he would be voting against the measure, not for any coherent reason, but because he believes blue states kill babies after they are born: "That way you can do an abortion in the ninth month. And, you know, some of the states, like Minnesota and other states have it where you can actually execute the baby after birth, and all of that stuff is unacceptable. So I'll be voting no for that reason.”

He keeps promoting that lie that states allow babies to be killed after birth. At any rate, he says he'll be voting no. In other words, he'll vote to keep the six week ban. And even if he's voting to prevent babies who are already born to be killed, or in the ninth month, this law only protects abortion rights up to the moment of fetal viability, and therefore, he could vote yes. So, as always, everything he says is bullshit.

Imagine Kamala Harris not being able to articulate her position on abortion and reversing herself within 24 hours and having it being reported as merely a clarification or simply mixed signals, as the media did for Trump here. The elite press is also willing to uncritically report Trump’s Hail Mary moves on reproductive health, such as his recent assertion that he would make IVF free. (His campaign has no explanation as to how this would be funded.) Further, no one is pressing him on how he’d require universal coverage for IVF, a thing opposed by many religious conservatives, when his administration previously helmed an effort to allow religious employers to opt out of providing birth control.

There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.

The media don't try to hold him to standards of any other political candidate.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.