While some Republican candidates, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, really don’t want to talk about abortion bans and Republican strategists are trying to change the subject to contraception, forced birth activists aren’t going to let them. They will make a national abortion ban an issue for 2024, including for Donald Trump.
Trump has famously been all over the place on the issue, veering from stating unequivocally “I am very pro-choice” in 1999 to advocating “some form of punishment” for women obtaining abortion in 2016. More recently, he’s criticized Republican states that have banned abortion with no exceptions and suggested he could make some kind of a deal on the “number of weeks or months or however you want to define it” in which abortions could be performed. “Other than certain parts of the country, you can’t — you’re not going to win on this issue. But you will win on this issue when you come up with the right number of weeks.”
Suffice it to say Trump’s not a big thinker when it comes to this issue, and the forced birth movement knows it. They are also convinced they’ll have him if he makes it back into the White House, because they know he needs them to win again. “Is he the most pro-life person? No,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told The Washington Post. “But he keeps his deals.”
Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America told The Washington Post in recent days that Trump has “built an enormous amount of trust with pro-life voters, as his presidency was the most consequential in American history for the pro-life cause.” Piling on is Roger Severino, who had served as Trump’s director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services and is a vice president and domestic policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “I don’t see his previous statements as limiting [Trump’s] ability to be a strong pro-life president” Severino told the Post.
He should know. After all, his organization is behind the nefarious Project 2025, the ambitious totalitarian agenda for the next Republican president that includes nothing less than resurrecting a 19th-century law, the 1873 Comstock Act, written to prevent women from obtaining contraceptives. The forced birth movement wants to use it to outlaw the abortion pill for most abortions. The law is unfortunately still on the books, though was basically made inert when the Supreme Court decided in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, that a basic right to privacy covers the use of contraceptives.
Trump, or any Republican president, could reverse the FDA’s 2000 approval of the abortion pill, a key part of the Project 2025 forced birth agenda, since it is used in more than half of abortions. There’s also the Trump-packed U.S. Supreme Court, which will consider rolling back Biden administration regulations that provide greater access to the drug. So the confidence of the forced birth movement in Trump is well-founded.
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