Oswald Clark:
Photo credit: Post Millennial
After the June debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, it became obvious that the incumbent was unable to mount a vigorous campaign for re-election and about a month later he was convinced that it would be better for the Democrats if he would step down as the party’s presidential candidate. He reportedly resisted stepping aside but former speaker Nancy Pelosi and former president Barack Obama orchestrated a campaign making it impossible for Biden to remain the candidate. Within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement on X (formerly Twitter) on July 21, Vice President Kamala Harris had secured the Democrat presidential nomination when she had the support of the majority of delegates to the Democratic national convention and all viable challengers publicly endorsing her.
Polls had showed Trump was leading in all seven swing states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada – a lead that only grew after the debate debacle on June 25. After Trump survived an assassination attempt just before the Republican convention in mid-July, the Republican standard-bearer seemed unbeatable. According to polls, Harris has made the race too close to call. While the campaign dynamics appear to have changed dramatically, the party leadership seems locked in on their respective positions on abortion.
Earlier this year Trump said he would not support a national abortion ban and would leave abortion to the states to regulate or restrict. Pro-life senators Marco Rubio and JD Vance, two of the three finalists under consideration to be Trump’s running mate, both got into line with the former president’s position, undermining their previous commitment to ban all abortions including in cases of rape and incest.
Prior to the convention, the Republican Party amended the platform to remove pro-life language and water down the party’s position on abortion. Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two of Trump’s advisors, wrote a memo to delegates arguing for a streamlined platform to “ensure our policy commitments to the American people” are “easily digestible.” Furthermore, where former platform debates were open to the public, debate and voting on the 2024 platform was behind closed doors. Also breaking convention, a draft of the proposed platform was not circulated before the meeting to approve the document. There have been reports that Trump loyalists stream-rolled the debate to prevent a full debate on the party’s position on abortion.
Two pro-life delegates from South Carolina were blocked from the platform committee after they publicly said they would vote against any attempt to water down the party’s long-time commitment to oppose all abortion. Language that committed the party to a constitutional amendment to uphold the right to life for all preborn children in previous platforms, including the 2016 and 2020 Republican platforms when Trump ran previously, was expunged and replaced with the statement: “We will oppose late-term abortions while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF.” Out is the language that “all (Americans) are endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to life” and “accordingly, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” and also the party’s call for a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution.
Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, thanked Donald Trump for the inclusion of language that said the “due process clause” of the Constitution can be used by states to restrict or outlaw abortion, although he thought it was a mistake to water down the party’s abortion commitments. Students for Life were among the pro-life groups that expressed disappointment in the new Republican platform but agreed there were still positives and that pro-life Americans could work with it.
Pro-life groups have generally lined up against Biden and the Democrats, ignoring Trump’s position as the lesser of two evils. Trump is counting on his new position to leave abortion for states to decide to win over suburban moderates who tend to be less pro-life than the Republican Party at large while counting on the Religious Right to stay in the fold because the Democrats are so extreme in their pro-abortion advocacy. So far, the second part of that goal seems to be working. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said “the mission of the pro-life movement over the next six months must be to defeat the Biden-Harris extreme abortion agenda.”
Biden had repeatedly supported had Congressional Democrats’ goal to codify Roe, the former Supreme Court decision that was overturned in 2022. Passing a pro-abortion law would overturn state-level bans on abortion that exist in about half of the states. During the presidential debate, Trump attacked Biden over his support of abortion “up to the moment of birth.” Biden denied it but has vowed to sign into law a Democratic measure that would permit abortion for all nine months of pregnancy.
Kamala Harris has supported the Biden administration’s pro-abortion extremism. Earlier this year she became the first sitting president or vice president to visit an abortion mill as part of what the White House dubbed the “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour. The Democrats have been campaigning on abortion since Roe was overturned and have repeatedly defied polling at the Congressional and state level to score unexpected victories. They made “abortion rights” a centerpiece of their attacks on Trump and his running mate JD Vance, calling their soft pro-life position “weird” and a threat to the “reproductive freedom” of women across the country.
During the Democratic National Convention last month in Chicago, a state-funded Planned Parenthood abortion van provided free abortions and vasectomies to delegates and other visitors to the city. Planned Parenthood reported that their appointments were booked up immediately, but it was later revealed that the mobile unit was only offering 25 free appointments over the course of the four-day convention.
Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life America, condemned the abortion van stunt and launched a diaper-drive initiative for local crisis pregnancy centres that raised more than $5000.
Day, whose organization has 17,000 members, said “the party has left pro-life Democrats” and that “we don’t want to leave, we love the party, and we want it to be strong and inclusive.”
Prior to the convention, Harris chose as her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who in 2023 signed a bill enshrining “the fundamental right” to abortion access in the state. (Despite the media portraying Walz as a moderate midwestern dad who taught high school and coached football, Walz is a radical who stood by during the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 and signed into law a requirement that menstrual products be made available in men’s restrooms.)
Speakers during the Democrat convention repeatedly highlighted abortion in a positive view. Kate Cox, speaking for Texas Democrats during the roll call, told her story about leaving the state to have an abortion after her preborn child was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a condition that has a low likely of survival. The crowd cheered when she announced that she is newly pregnant.
Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson spoke during the third day of the convention. During her address she talked about a Georgia woman who was “pregnant and didn’t want to be.” Politico reported it was “the first time a speaker at a Democratic convention highlighted a woman with an unwanted pregnancy” as previously Democrats talked about women who were raped or faced health issues who sought an abortion. Bill Clinton in 1992 talked about making abortion “safe, legal and rare” and Biden focused his comments on so-called hard cases. Politico reported, “The party, now firmly in its Kamala Harris era, is widening the lens” and McGill Johnson told the publication, “Look at the immediate shift that we’ve seen with the vice president, around trusting women,” adding, “From a messaging standpoint, it’s really important because it’s setting up a broader kind of values framework for the policy to live in.”
The Republicans, however, seemed to run away from abortion. The Washington Post reported that there were few speakers during the Republican convention who addressed the issue. Trump and Vance’s response to the Democrats is to call their opponents extreme without making the case against abortion. Trump dismissed abortion as a “small” issue and his son, Eric, said that conservatives shouldn’t prioritize abortion: “At the end of the day, this country has holes in the roof, and you’ve got to fix those holes and stop worrying about the spot on the wall in the basement.” (Eric’s wife, Lara Trump, is the chairman of the Republican Party and was largely behind the platform process that railroaded pro-lifers.) Students for Life released a statement responding to Eric Trump: “If you can’t multitask and deal with mold in the basement and holes in the roof, don’t ask to take over the House and Senate and White House.”
Trump had indicated he would not uphold the Comstock law which bans sending abortifacients through the U.S. Postal Service and has said he supports the availability of the abortion pill. Vance, who previously had a spotless pro-life record, also committed a Republican White House to protecting the legality of the abortion pill. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, more than half of all abortions in the United States are committed with abortion pills rather than surgical abortions.
The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote that “GOP cowardice on life in the womb is nothing new” and that the Trump-led Republicans are falling for the Democratic and media line that “Republicans can only win elections by disavowing pro-life policies.” She said Trump and the party are “playing a dangerous game in a close and crucial election year” but more problematically the cynical ploy “risks changing the culture and voters’ minds in favour of the radical abortion policy touted by Democrats.”
Regardless of the politics, though, Boyd says the true cost of the Republican’s watered-down principles is not electoral victory or defeat, but the lives of millions of babies.
