Can Trump Be Trusted on Abortion?

A confident, articulate Sen. JD Vance took the vice-presidential debate stage at CBS News Tuesday night to assuage American doubts about reelecting Donald Trump. Balancing his own more pro-life position with a determination to present Trump’s abortion rhetoric as both moderate and pro-family, Vance may have successfully threaded a needle that Republican politicians, including his running mate, had previously failed to do.

“We've got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people's trust back on this issue where they frankly just don't trust us,” Vance said. 

And I think that's one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do. I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there's so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.

Unswerving, Vance maintained his previous assertion that the abortion bill signed into law under his interlocutor, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was “barbaric.”

“It says that a doctor who presides over an abortion, where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late term abortion,” Vance said. “That is, I think, whether it's not pro-choice or pro-abortion, that is fundamentally barbaric. And that's why I use that word.”

In the aftermath of the debate, Trump promised to veto a national abortion ban should one come to his desk as president. Previously, during his debate with Kamala Harris, he had refused to commit to a veto, a glimmer of hope for pro-life Americans amid his recent leftward drift on the issue. A few days before the September debate, Trump seemed to support Florida’s Amendment 4, a ballot proposal that, if passed, would add a right to abortion until fetal viability to the state’s constitution in November. Trump later walked back his comments, but continued to criticize Florida’s six-week ban. However he did not diminish his support for insurance-sponsored IVF procedures, despite backlash from pro-life Christians over the number of embryos destroyed in a single routine round of IVF and the unsavory characters who would benefit from subsidized baby buying. The month prior to Trump’s comments, JD Vance told NBC News that he supported access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs responsible for chemical abortions, following the Supreme Court’s procedural dismissal of FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

Clearly, the Republican Party has moved leftward on abortion. Largely due to a consuming fear of losing the 2024 election, the biggest names have sought to position themselves as the palatable party on life, neither banning abortion before fetal viability, nor stomaching it afterward. Under the leadership of Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee dropped support for a twenty-week national abortion ban from its platform one week before the 2024 convention. “We will oppose late term abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments),” the document reads. Previously, the twenty-week ban had been the bare minimum offer from the GOP, one moderate enough to have been a party plank through several election cycles. Trump endorsed it, and its concurrent statement on constitutional rights for unborn children, in 2016 and 2020. 

The broader movement’s shift raises an important question: Do Trump and Vance now sincerely favor more liberal abortion policies, or are they playing election politics, with the knowledge that no change can come without first securing the ballot box?

It is an impossible question to answer fully, not least because politicians are notorious shapeshifters. Still, the right managed to hold Trump to many of his 2016 campaign promises once in office, and pro-lifers should seek the same again, should they have the opportunity. The trouble in 2024 is that Trump is not promising much of anything to the right on abortion, and the Republican Party seems all too happy to drop baggage it no longer wants to carry.  

Past actions are the best predictor of future actions. The Trump campaign and the man himself are relying on voters to remember that Dobbs would not have happened without Trump’s justice appointees, and fair enough. Of his time in the Oval Office, Trump may boast a handful of pro-life moments, not least of which was his appearance as the first sitting president at the March for Life rally. His support of the failed twenty-week abortion ban in Congress was especially bold in 2017, since Roe protected abortions until the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy at the time.

Vance, as a Catholic, is more interesting. Like evangelical Mike Pence, Vance’s selection as vice presidential candidate clearly aims to secure Christian votes for Trump, but this time from a decidedly more modish angle. Unlike Pence, Vance has demonstrated a capacity for political dexterity that makes him at once more impressive and more capricious. Winning his U.S. Senate seat on the first attempt was noteworthy. Getting the vice presidential slot only a year later was striking, not least because of his prior opposition to Trump’s candidacy. (He notoriously said white, working-class Americans would be less attracted to Trump if they spent more time in church.) 

Three weeks after Vance was sworn into office as U.S. Senator, he took a hardline position on abortion, joining some forty members of Congress to sign a letter urging U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to enforce the Comstock Act. The 1873 anti-vice law, which forbids the mailing of lewd materials including abortive drugs, has not been enforced in this way since Margaret Sanger successfully sued to exempt physicians from the law in 1936. (Roe made the point moot.) Were Comstock to be enforced, it would end the mail-order distribution of abortifacient drugs that have caused numerous deaths since the FDA approved mifepristone for home use. Now, Vance has since said he favors mifepristone “access.” Perhaps the two are not contradictory: Saying a woman should have to go to a doctor to get the pills is not the same as supporting a ban on all chemical abortions. Just as likely, Vance has adjusted his position, following the Overton window. 

Like Pence, Vance’s church affiliation should incline him to see abortion eradicated, but Vance also has the benefit of having watched Pence, like so many others, be sidelined into obsolescence. There is no debating the fact that pro-abortion ballot measures, wherever they have been raised, have won decidedly, even in states as red as Kansas and Kentucky. There is no serious case to be made that Trump and Vance could win on a staunchly pro-life platform in 2024, much as Christians would wish otherwise. Nevertheless, it is also the case that for pro-life voters, Kamala Harris is not an option. It now remains for conservatives who care about life to keep the heat on Trump, on Vance, and especially on the Republican Party, to insist that they act and speak to protect life, even as they seek to win the ballot box.

Carmel Richardson is a contributing editor at the American Conservative. 

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Image by Gage Skidmore, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.