Jamie Kelter Davis / New York Times
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, campaigns in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, April 2, 2024. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, the leading anti-abortion group supporting Republican candidates, says she is “deeply disappointed” in Trump’s position that states should decide abortion rights.
Thursday, April 11, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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On Monday, in a video released on Truth Social, Donald Trump said his view on abortion now is that “the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land.”
Don’t be fooled.
Trump has spent years pursuing a radical agenda to strip women of their right to privacy and bodily autonomy.
In February 2016, while campaigning for president, Trump promised to defund Planned Parenthood.One month later, he went even further, saying that women who seek abortions should be subject to “some form of punishment.”
By October 2016, the same month that the infamous Access Hollywood tape was released, Trump vowed to appoint the number of Supreme Court justices necessary to overturn Roe v. Wade and end American women’s right to control their own bodies and health choices.
Once elected, he followed through, working with House Republicans to eliminate Medicaid reimbursements for Planned Parenthood and pass a 20-week national abortion ban that Trump said he “strongly supports.”
By October 2020, Trump had appointed three new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. In June 2022, despite their sworn testimony in Senate confirmation hearings that Roe was “an important precedent” that had been challenged and reaffirmed, all of them voted to overturn the landmark case granting women the right to privacy and autonomy over their health care.
The court left the question of abortion to the states’ discretion. This created a situation we have not seen since the bleakest days of segregation: American citizens enjoying fundamentally different rights depending on the state in which they live. Republican-led states rushed to impose ever-harsher penalties for abortion and tighten governmental control of the bodies of women unfortunate enough to live in these states.
Since then, Trump has touted his role in fulfilling his promise to overturn Roe. Less than a month ago, he told WABC radio host Sid Rosenberg that he would support a 15-week national abortion ban.
Yet now, with the election hanging in the balance, Trump wants us to believe he has had a change of heart and he won’t seek a nationwide ban, even though he did exactly that when he was president. The entire video is, to quote President Joe Biden, “a bunch of malarkey.”
Other lies in the video include claims that Democrats support abortion “up to and even beyond the ninth month,” having doctors execute babies after they are born.
Of course, killing a baby after it is born is murder in every state. The post-birth “abortion” myth is a lie Trump has told often over the years and it should have triggered news outlets to dismiss the entire video as yet another example of manipulative propaganda from the criminally dishonest, delusional and disgraced former president.
Instead, some news organizations engaged in the deception, running headlines claiming that Trump “squashed the congressional GOP push for national abortion limits.”
Trump knows the GOP’s stand on abortion is poison at the polls because 70% of Americans support a women’s right to control their own bodies. His new claims are nothing more than a head fake. If returned to office, Trump and GOP extremists in states across the country will not rest until the equivalent of a national ban is in place.
If you doubt the consequences of what happens when we give the state control over women’s bodies, you need to look no further than the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970. The act had a positive effect in many areas of reproductive health care for poor people. It was also abused in horrific ways by bad actors in repressive states, leading to a wave of forced sterilizations of Native American women and women on Medicaid. Some Native American activists point to evidence that as many as 25% of Native women of childbearing age were sterilized in the first seven years following the act’s implementation.
In Phoenix, unrequested sterilizations of Native women, poor Latinos and Blacks women took place not five miles from the Arizona Supreme Court building where justices vowed again, earlier this week, to control women’s bodies.
Just one day after Trump’s post to Truth Social, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a near-total abortion ban that was originally passed in the 1860s, quite literally rewinding the legal clock to a time when slavery was legal and women couldn’t vote.
The ruling makes Arizona the 15th state to ban abortion from the moment of conception. Ten of those states have no exceptions for rape or incest. But even that isn’t far enough for Republican lawmakers determined to control women.
At least 15 states are considering “fetal rights” legislation that would further limit women’s health care options once pregnant, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Trump is clearly terrified that the women of America will bring him down, as they have done before. He certainly hoped to take the issue of abortion off the table as a matter of national politics by publicly declaring it to be an issue for the states to decide. Instead, he shined a spotlight on the deeply disturbing and oppressive agenda of the GOP on the issue of abortion and women’s rights in general.
The vast majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal during the early stages of pregnancy and there is near-unanimous support for abortion options in cases of rape, incest or to protect the health and welfare of the mother. Yet the GOP and its leader, Donald Trump, continue to pursue a radical and dangerous agenda that seeks to ban abortion and limit other reasonable health care options for all women across the country.
We need not agree on all the particulars of women’s health care policy to agree that women deserve to be treated as full citizens with the same rights over their bodies as men, and those rights should be uniformly applied nationwide. Trump and the GOP must be rejected now and every day until after the election in November.
