When it comes to abortion, Republicans are doing nothing less than gaslighting America.
Well aware that the divisive issue could be their Achilles’ heel in November, the GOP is pretending to soften its opposition to abortion rights.
Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance scrubbed his website of absolutist antiabortion rhetoric during last week’s Republican National Convention. On Monday, the day former President Trump named Vance as his running mate, Vance’s Senate campaign website espoused “the sanctity of all life” and called for “eliminating abortion.” By Tuesday afternoon, the language was gone, according to HuffPost, and then the website itself disappeared as it redirected users to Trump’s website.
“My view is that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and his views on abortion are going to be the views that dominate this party and drive this party forward,” Vance told Fox News on Monday. “You have to believe in reasonable exceptions because that’s where the American people are.”
But that’s not where the American people are. The American people overwhelmingly believe abortion should be legal in almost all cases, not just in “reasonable exceptions.” It is a minority — the loud Christian right to which Trump owes his takeover of the Republican Party — that does not want women to have abortions ever, full stop.
Hence the gaslighting.
It began after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022. That year’s midterm elections soon gave Republicans a rude awakening to the public’s opinion of the decision, which ended half a century of federal reproductive rights. Polls had identified inflation as voters’ biggest concern, but abortion ended up looming like a dark cloud over Republican candidates.
Young women and women over 65 broke hard for Democrats, who gave up only a small fraction of House seats they were expected to lose as the incumbent party. Nearly half of voters and nearly two-thirds of Democrats said the court’s abortion decision, in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, had a major impact on their choices. Dobbs, one Democratic strategist told NPR, “made this argument of Republican extremism more real to voters. It connected the dots.”
And now, in an effort to win over suburban women, the Republican Party is scrambling to disconnect those dots.
A Wall Street Journal poll last spring found that while Trump narrowly led President Biden in six of seven battleground states, 39% of suburban women said abortion was a make-or-break issue for them, more important than any other. A majority said they considered Trump’s abortion stance too restrictive.
So how can Trump allay the fears of these voters? As he always does: by making stuff up.
First, he is claiming he never supported a federal ban on abortion, which is, of course, a blatant lie. As president, he supported a federal abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy; he later said he was open to one after 15 weeks. And he even told Chris Matthews in 2016 that women who seek abortions should face “some form of punishment.”
And of course, he has spent the last two years crowing about his Supreme Court nominees, all three of whom voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Brett M. Kavanaugh, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett engaged in their own gaslighting when they misled the Senate about their views on the issue during their confirmation hearings. All said they respected stare decisis, the principle that justices should be guided by the decisions made by previous courts, such as Roe and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which reaffirmed and refined the rights set out in Roe.
Trump officially retreated from his earlier positions in April, saying in a video posted on his Truth Social platform, “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land — in this case, the law of the state.”
But in June, in a recorded video message for the Danbury Institute, a coalition of Christian nationalists that has described abortion as “child sacrifice,” Trump seemed to signal that he agreed. “I’ll be with you side by side,” he promised. “You’re gonna make a comeback like just about no other group.”
Capitulating to Trump’s political calculation, the GOP platform has been watered down on abortion for the first time in decades. Since 1984, the platform has embraced a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Now the platform says states should be free to determine their own laws on the subject and that the party will support policies that “advance Prenatal care, access to Birth Control and IVF,” or fertility treatments.
It’s no wonder given that voters have supported reproductive rights in all seven of the states that have had abortion on the ballot since Dobbs. Voters in 11 more states will have the chance this fall to keep abortion legal or to enshrine it as a constitutional right.
Republicans all over this country are ripping away the agency of American women while pretending otherwise. Come November, women and all those who support us have a fighting chance to get it back.