The pro-life movements' not-so-secret plan for Trump

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Donald Trump has made no secret that he considers his party's position on reproductive rights to be a political liability. He has blamed the abortion issue for his party's disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections, and he recently blasted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' support for a six-year abortion ban. weeks. Trump seems eager to be the Republican who can turn this loser of a political issue into a winner.

And we've just seen how he plans to do it. Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump had expressed support for the idea of ​​a national ban on abortion after 16 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases of rape or incest, or to save life from the mother.

Anti-abortion activists obviously don't think such a restriction goes far enough. Some of Trump's most prominent allies, including evangelical leaders and political advisers, adamantly support a total ban, a position Trump knows is poisonous. Trump doesn't want to say anything official about a 16-week ban, the report said, until he secures the nomination, to avoid discouraging diehard primary voters who favor a total ban.

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After that, adopting a 16-week limit could benefit him in the general election. That would put some distance between him and the hard-liners in his orbit, while helping him attract more moderate voters. And just as importantly, by discussing gestational limits, Trump and his allies would distract voters from the much larger goals of dedicated abortion opponents.

To dissect the 16-week proposal a little: the number is biologically arbitrary, because it has no relation to fetal viability, as do some state limits. Sixteen is apparently just a happy number. You know what I like about 16? he would have said. It's even. It's been four months. Trump and his allies see this as a compromise position because it is stricter than the Roe v. Wades about 24 weeks, but it still provides a wider window than the six-week limit in Georgia and South Carolina, or the outright bans that conservatives have fought for in 14 states, including Alabama, Texas and Indiana.

In November, a proposal to set a federal limit of 16 weeks could, in theory, be a politically advantageous position for Trump. Nearly every available poll suggests that most Americans support legal access to abortion, with some limits. Several countries in Europe already have a 12 or 15 week limit on layoffs, although in practice U.S. state bans are much more restrictive.

Now, at least, Trump will have an answer when President Joe Biden attacks him and other Republicans for being too extreme on abortion. The rule of politics is: when you talk generically about abortion rights, Democrats do well, and when you talk about the specifics of abortion, number of weeks, parental consent, Republicans are winning, Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist (who says he's not a Trump fan), told me. Republicans, he said, will be able to put Democrats on the defensive by forcing them to justify abortion after 16 weeks, which would likely mean having to make more complex arguments about how tests revealing Serious fetal abnormalities or maternal health risks usually occur as late as possible. 20 weeks.

However, a ban remains a ban. Although voters say in polls that they support some sort of limit on abortion, that is not the case at the ballot box. Last year, Glenn Youngkin, who flipped Virginia's governorship from blue to red in 2021, persuaded several Republican candidates to unite around a 15-week abortion ban before the national election of November. The position was intended to signal reasonableness and help swing the state legislature back to Republicans. But the strategy failed miserably: Democrats maintained their majority in the Senate and also flipped control of the House of Delegates.

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Voters see through efforts to disguise a moderate position that is actually a ban on abortion, Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the progressive organization Swing Left, told me. And Trump's position over 16 weeks, she believes, would be a huge miscalculation of where voters stand.

At this point, any endorsement by Trump of a national limit on abortion is nothing more than strategic messaging — a ploy to win over moderate voters in the general election. Such a measure would require 60 votes in the Senate, making it virtually impossible to pass, even if Republicans win back majorities in the House and Senate. It just doesn't happen. This is why the 16-week proposal is also a diversion.

The question people should be asking is whether Trump will give free rein to anti-abortion advisers in his orbit, Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis Law School, told me. The big thing these advisors are calling for is the reinterpretation and enforcement of the Comstock Act. As I wrote in December, activists believe they can use this largely dormant, 150-year-old anti-obscenity law to ban abortion nationwide because it prohibits the shipping of any object that can be used to terminate a pregnancy. The Heritage Foundations Project 2025, a 920-page manual written by a collective of pro-Trump conservatives, urges the next Republican president to pursue criminal charges against those who send or receive abortion materials under the Comstock Act. The 2025 plan also proposes that the FDA withdraw its approval of the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol.

Federal bans can't pass, an anti-abortion lawyer, who requested anonymity to comment freely on an issue dear to his political allies, told me, but there's no need to try with Comstock in books. The administration could exclude Planned Parenthood from Medicaid by claiming the women's health care provider is violating the law, he suggested. She could launch criminal investigations into abortion funds and abortion pill distribution networks. Of course, if Trump is interested in doing any of this, he can't talk about it on the campaign trail, the lawyer said: He's obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal [legislative] ban, and see if it works to get elected.

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Some of the 2025 Project's authors, Gene Hamilton, Roger Severino and Stephen Miller, have worked for Trump in the past and would likely serve as close advisers in a second administration. The idea seems to be that Trump is so disinterested in the technicalities of abortion-related issues that he will rely on this orbit of trusted advisers to shape his policies. We saw a similar approach during Trump's first term, when the president's top aides found ways not to do the extreme and dangerous things that Trump wanted and hoped not to notice. This time around, if Trump is re-elected, his advisers will appear likely to circumvent the president in order to achieve their own extreme goals.

I hope they don't tell him about Comstock, the lawyer said. I don't want Trump to know Comstock exists.

When I contacted Severino, who currently works for the Heritage Foundation and wrote Project 2025's section on abortion policy, he declined to make specific predictions about strategy. But his response hinted at the aspirations of his movement. All I can say is that [Trump] had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies in history, he said. This is our best indicator of the type of policies he would implement the second time around.

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