Trump’s Calculated Ambiguity On Abortion Is Starting To Fall Apart
Donald Trump has said more on abortion in the past few weeks of his presidential campaign than he has in the last two years. And it’s increasingly clear why he has strategically danced around the subject for so long.
ABC moderators and Vice President Kamala Harris are likely to push Trump to clarify his stance on abortion during Tuesday night’s highly anticipated presidential debate. It’s safe to assume he will reiterate his thoughts on abortion later in pregnancy and say something about Democrats murdering newborn babies and botched abortions — common, though completely untrue, talking points for Republicans.
But he could also be pushed to clarify his policy stance about abortion earlier in pregnancy — because lately, he’s been all over the map.
Trump was critical in repealing federal abortion protections. The former president has bragged about it countless times and continues to falsely claim that “everyone” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. Now, as the election nears and polls suggest a tightening race, Trump is rapidly trying to change his tune.
Recently, Trump proclaimed that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” — a sentence that sounds more like a Planned Parenthood press release than something said by a man who once endorsed punishing women who get abortions with jail time.
He has distanced himself from Project 2025 and its wish list of extreme anti-abortion policy proposals, claiming that he hasn’t even read it, though the plan mentions him over 300 times and was created by several of his longtime allies. He has said he won’t enact a national abortion ban if elected and won’t enforce the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law that abortion opponents want to use to criminalize sending abortion pills by mail. But he doesn’t seem to have a clue what mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions, is.
Trump, a Florida resident, seemed to suggest last week he would vote in support of a Florida state constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights. He told NBC News that the state’s current six-week abortion ban is “too short” (contrary to his position in 2023, when he boasted that “without me there would be no six weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks” abortion bans).
Hours later, Trump’s campaign backtracked, clarifying he has not announced how he will vote. The next day Trump said he plans to vote against the abortion rights amendment, and falsely claimed that pro-abortion rights states allow women to kill newborn babies.
Trump has “changed his position four times on abortion in the last 48 hours,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told CNN shortly after the Florida amendment debacle. The pivoting shows Trump “has no values,” Schiff said.
Trump’s stance on the baseline idea of what role government should even play in setting abortion restrictions has also been unclear. Since championing the fall of federal abortion protections, he has repeatedly said he believes regulating abortion should be left to the states. But he’s been critical of some of the most extreme restrictions, saying Arizona’s near-total abortion ban “went too far,” and describing GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ six-week ban as a “terrible mistake.”
The presidential nominee set off a scramble within the GOP last week when he pledged that the government will pay for fertility treatments — including in vitro fertilization, which can cost up to $30,000 per cycle. The idea is counter to the beliefs of many of his Republican colleagues, who have voted against IVF protections as part of a broader anti-abortion stance. Trump himself has deep ties to the anti-IVF movement.
“American women are not stupid,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said on a recent press call organized by Harris’ presidential campaign. Warren called Trump’s IVF proposal “smoke and mirrors,” adding that “making vague promises about insurance coverage does not stop a single extremist judge or state legislature from banning IVF.”
Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, urged voters on the same call not to believe Trump’s promises. Timmaraju pointed to the fact that Trump’s own party platform includes language that suggests fertilized eggs should have full personhood rights under the 14th Amendment — a stance that, taken to its logical conclusion, is a call for a total abortion ban and threatens access to contraception and IVF.
“Donald Trump knew what he was doing when he included the 14th Amendment [language] in the party platform,” Timmaraju said. “They’re winking at the anti-abortion extremists, telling them, ‘Don’t worry about what else I have to say to get elected. This is what I’m really going to do.’”
It seems the only people who actually believe Trump when he says he’s moderate on abortion are those in his right-wing evangelical base, many of whom are angry that he seems to be waffling on his more extreme positions.
In the wake of his Florida comments, conservative and far-right media outlets have recently published headlines like, “Trump Stabs Florida Pro-Lifers in the Front,” and “How Donald Trump Can Regain The Support Of Pro-Lifers.”
“It is not the job of the pro-life movement to vote for President Trump,” Lila Rose, leader of the national anti-abortion group Live Action, said in a recent interview with Politico.
If the election were today, Rose said she would not vote for Trump based on his current policies — a statement that a Trump campaign adviser described as a “tacit endorsement” of Harris.
Rose suggested that if Trump doesn’t change his tune soon, his anti-abortion base could easily put their weight behind a write-in candidate. (Far-right anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry will be on the presidential ballot in several states.)
Students For Life Action president Kristan Hawkins said her phone was “blowing up” with angry calls and texts from anti-abortion advocates who’ve refused to canvas for Trump since he signaled he might support Florida’s abortion rights amendment.
“We want to be able to go back to our base and be able to show them that President Trump, despite what they’ve heard in the media, despite some of his confusing or cutesy tweets, is still going to be a plus in the column for the pro-life movement,” Hawkins told Politico on Thursday for a report on the possibility of Trump appointing an anti-abortion leader to a prominent position in his administration.
The presidential debate is a high-stakes opportunity to get more information from a candidate who has offered few specifics on one of the most critical issues this election season. Moderators will need to hold Trump’s feet to the fire when it comes to his inconsistent abortion policy, which at best is nonexistent and at worst enacts the far-right fever dream of Project 2025’s national abortion ban.