It’s been a revealing week for Republicans’ views on reproductive rights. On Monday, presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump promised to remain “side by side” with an organization that has called abortion “child sacrifice” and advocates for abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest. On Wednesday, the Southern Baptist Convention, the 14-million member evangelical denomination with the GOP, adopted a resolution declaring fertilized eggs to be human beings and opposing IVF. Governments “are ordained by God to safeguard human dignity,” the resolution said, and Southern Baptists should “advocate for the government to restrain actions inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.”
And on Thursday, after Trump told House Republicans not to be “afraid of the [abortion] issue,” 46 Senate Republicans filibustered a Democratic bill safeguarding IVF, the second time in two weeks they derailed a measure protecting reproductive freedom.
All this evidence of growing radicalization comes as the Republican National Committee embarks on drafting its first platform in eight years. Leading Christian right activists, not satisfied with their successes in overturning the right to abortion and enacting abortion bans in states across the country, are warning their followers that the GOP platform may soften the party’s official position. They are urging their grassroots followers to lean on party leaders and delegates to maintain an uncompromising anti-abortion plank.
There is no “moderate” stance on abortion within the GOP.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council and a close Trump ally who played a key role in the party’s 2016 platform, is pressuring the RNC to continue to take a hard line. At a recent Michigan GOP dinner, Perkins exhorted Republican officials to be “inflexible on this important principle of the sanctity of human life.” Ralph Reed, the head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and also a close White House confidant in Trump’s first term, told The Washington Post last week, “I don’t think that it would be either morally sound or politically advisable for the party to signal retreat on the sanctity of innocent human life in its platform.”
Not for the first time, Trump may know evangelical voters better than their leaders do: polling data shows that white evangelicals once again are already entrenched in their plans to vote for him. Yet these leaders are trying to use the prospect of evangelicals withholding their votes to force Trump to adopt a plank that is wildly unpopular nationwide.
These demands, combined with the visibility this week of evangelical and Republican opposition to IVF, make it clearer than ever that there is no “moderate” stance on abortion within the GOP. That’s why Trump is desperately trying to confuse voters through hedging and obfuscating his position on abortion bans. Remember that, in late April, Trump told Time magazine he would release his position on regulating abortion medication “probably over the next week.” Two months later, there’s no sign of his policy.
Trump’s problem is that, on the one hand, the leadership of his most important base is pressing for ever more draconian government interference in the bedroom and doctor’s office. On the other, these positions are increasingly unpopular since voters found out that Republicans not only relished overturning Roe, but intended to enacting radically punitive bans on abortion and even IVF.
A new Gallup poll shows voters are moving in the opposite direction from Trump’s most essential voting bloc. Identifying as “pro-choice,” Gallup reports, is now the “new normal,” with 54% of American adults adopting the label. Fifty percent want abortion legal “under certain circumstances,” a record-high 35% want it legal “under all circumstances” and a record-low 12% oppose it in all circumstances.
What’s more, Dobbs has led pro-choice voters to recognize the importance of Supreme Court nominees.
And the issue’s importance to voters has grown as well. Thirty-two percent of voters — again a record high — say they would only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion. These so-called single-issue voters have long been seen as more valuable to Republicans than to Democrats. But the Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade – for which Trump has correctly claimed responsibility – has triggered a change. The centrality of a candidate’s position on abortion, Gallup reports, is “markedly higher among pro-choice voters than it was during the 2020 presidential election cycle, while pro-life voters’ intensity about voting on the abortion issue has waned.”
What’s more, Dobbs has led pro-choice voters to recognize the importance of Supreme Court nominees. “A 58% majority of pro-choice Americans consider it very important that nominees’ abortion stance be the same as their own, compared with 45% of pro-life U.S. adults who say the same,” according to Gallup. That represents a reversal from when Gallup last asked this question in 2005, when a majority of anti-abortion voters saw it as very important.
Trump wants to have it both ways on abortion. He wants to brag to the base about his role in overturning Roe, but trick other voters into thinking he doesn’t share his own party’s extremism. If he denies and delays, promising but not delivering an abortion policy for voters to evaluate, he hopes the media will portray him as a “moderate,” even as his most important allies shout their views from the rooftops. Regardless of how the platform fight turns out, no one should be fooled. This week, Trump, his party and his allies made crystal clear once again that the GOP is a party of anti-abortion fanaticism.