Trump’s high-wire act on abortion angers conservatives

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump has been accused of deserting the anti-abortion movement as he seeks to negate attacks by Kamala Harris over one of the most polarising issues of the United States election.
The Republican nominee brags often about his role in overturning the constitutional right to abortion in the US.
But – under relentless fire from Harris and the Democratic Party, and with a majority of Americans supporting access to the procedure – the former president is now risking the ire of his right-wing base by claiming to promote “reproductive rights”.
“Trump’s abandonment of Pro-Lifers is complete,” said a headline in the conservative National Review last week.
Jeremy Boreing, the co-founder of right-wing website The Daily Wire, attacked the former president as “philosophically malleable”.
“His first term was perhaps the most pro-life in actual effect of any administration in our history. That is his legacy – if he will keep it,” Boreing said on X.
The backlash came after Trump took to his Truth Social platform last week to target Democrats, who had for days been attacking him over abortion at their national convention in Chicago.
“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” he wrote, hours after Harris accused him and the Republican Party of being “out of their minds” as she used her convention speech to criticise their abortion stance.
Trump’s post was “the worst statement Donald Trump has made” since he launched his campaign for president in 2015, Boreing said.
It was “hard to interpret in any other way than as an affirmatively pro-choice statement”, wrote Philip Klein, editor of the National Review Online, referring to abortion rights.
“By the common usage of the term, if you support reproductive rights it means you want broader access to abortion.”
Conservatives – along with everyone else – have long grappled with how to understand Trump’s stance on abortion, which has shifted often over the years.
His stacking of the Supreme Court with justices handpicked for their abortion views allowed it to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that had enshrined the procedure as a right.
That seismic move in 2022 made him a hero to many in the anti-abortion movement, which had driven conservative voters to the polls for decades.
“I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he wrote in a Truth Social post last year. “Without me, the pro-Life movement would have just kept losing.”
But since then the issue has become an electoral problem for the Republican Party, firing up voters in many local, state and national elections to back Democrats, who have vowed to restore Roe.
Meanwhile the anti-abortion movement is pushing Trump to go further, with some decrying fertility treatments such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and others focused on demanding an unpopular national abortion ban.
Trump has appeared to want it both ways, dodging the question of a ban by insisting repeatedly that “everyone” wanted individual states to make their own decisions on abortion, even as he accuses Harris and the Democrats of “executing” babies.
In another Truth Social post last week, he also called the Republican Party a “leader” on IVF.
He announced on Thursday (Aug 29) – without any details on funding – that as president he would mandate free IVF treatments for any Americans who wanted it.
He also suggested in an interview with NBC that he would vote to overturn Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks’ pregnancy, which was “too short”. His campaign then quickly walked this back, saying Trump did not actually specify how he would vote when the referendum takes place in his home state in November.
Trump will “further alienate pro-lifers and divide his own party while doing absolutely zero to win over anybody pro-choice”, Klein wrote in the National Review.
That does not mean that conservatives will suddenly start voting for Harris, but for many on the right it appears to be time to move on.
“The cause is way bigger and younger than Donald Trump,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion non-profit, told AFP.
“It will shape the (Republican Party) beyond this Trump moment.”