'Serious liability': Why Trump’s efforts to dodge key issue are doomed to fail

22 October 2024

When Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris held their first — and probably their last — 2024 presidential debate in Philadelphia on September 10, the vice president hammered her GOP opponent relentlessly on reproductive rights.

Trump tried to frame abortion as a states' rights issue, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling of 2022 (which overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years) sent abortion back to the states where it belonged. But Harris — an attorney since 1990 and former California attorney general — maintained that Dobbs was a horrible, badly reasoned decision that endangered the health and wellbeing of American women. And according to debate analysis on MSNBC and CNN, it was obvious that Trump really didn't want to be talking about abortion.

In an op-ed published by the New York Times on October 22, Matthew Walther (editor of the Catholic publication The Lamp) argues that although Trump and other Republicans "would like the issue of abortion to disappear," it isn't going away.

"Donald Trump, who only eight years ago called for 'some kind of punishment' to be meted out to women who procured abortions, now speaks of 'reproductive rights,' a formulation preferred by proponents of legal abortion," Walther explains. "References to abortion have been all but eliminated from the party's platform. Even JD Vance, whose opposition to abortion is perhaps his most firmly established political position, now says that the oral abortifacient mifepristone should remain accessible."

Walther continues, "This retreat is, of course, understandable. For years, abortion appeared to be a mobilizing issue for Republican voters, particularly the evangelical base. But ever since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in its Dobbs decision in June 2022, the issue has become a liability, and a serious one, for the GOP."

The Lamp's editor goes on to note that Democrats "cautiously" voiced their pro-choice views in the past but are "now inclined to speak of abortion rights in sweeping moral terms as the very foundation of women's freedom and equality."

"Republicans now find themselves seeking compromise," Walther observes. "Strident talk about 'the unborn' has given way to muddled debates about the relative merits of six-week and 15-week thresholds and the applicability of the Comstock Act of 1873, which may or may not prohibit the mailing of abortifacients. At a Fox News town hall last week, Mr. Trump criticized abortion restrictions in some states for being 'too tough' and assured his audience that 'those are going to be redone.'"

Walther adds, "For Democrats, by contrast, there is no longer any political upside to being nuanced. Their message is that abortion is a universal right, whether acknowledged by the Supreme Court or not."

Matthew Walther's full op-ed for the New York Times is available at this link (subscription required).

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