No, Republicans Haven’t Eased Up On Anti-Abortion Politics

Hidden underneath the coverage of the Democratic debate freak out, there have been a few headlines about the RNC platform and its updated language on abortion. The news has generally described the changes as a “softening” of the hardline forced-birth position that the party has platformed and run on since 1980, as mentions of a federal abortion ban, a revival of the Comstock Act, and the demand for a Constitutional amendment stating that life starts at conception all disappeared in 2024. But this is a mischaracterization at best and an outright falsehood at worst. Republicans are as extreme on abortion as they have ever been; they just don’t want voters to know it.

As the backlash to Dobbs has manifested across the country, Donald Trump has been less enthusiastic about taking credit for delivering the forced-birth movement’s biggest political win since they set their sights on Roe almost half a century ago. Forcing pregnancy on unwilling people and higher maternal death rates might be wildly popular with the Evangelical base of the party, but it is extremely unpopular with regular voters, who have provided abortion rights with clear and unambiguous wins whenever it has made it onto the ballot. So to prevent his (very fragile) presidential candidacy from meeting the same end as abortion restrictions, Trump and the party that serves his whims have decided to fall back to his favorite tactic: lying to voters.

The first step is to obscure what MAGA goals are with language that confuses anyone who is not familiar with their playbook. Rather than use the wording of decades-old forced birth politics that has become familiar and alarming to regular people, the RNC shifted to a muddier, more innocuous-sounding statement about their belief in a particular interpretation of the 14th Amendment—which would guarantee personhood at conception. This extreme view of “equal protection” would give a fertilized egg all the legal and fundamental rights of a living, breathing born person at the Constitutional level, wiping out everything, everywhere from morning after pills and emergency contraception to IVF and fertility treatments to any form of abortion – medicinal, surgical, or emergency.

Now, instead of saddling Congress with the responsibility of passing deeply unpopular legislation or having their Electoral College loophole former President sign it — actions that would come with steep political consequences — the Republican Party has endorsed having deeply gerrymandered or suppressive state legislatures pass laws with the new 14th Amendment interpretation and getting the corrupt federal courts turn it into precedent. The ruling on the new “personhood” interpretation from the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court would then force everyone across the country to live the way Evangelicals think they should… or, in this case, die and suffer for failing to do so.

Republicans in Congress are helping this along by trying to get Project 2025 goals into legislation right now, adding anti-abortion riders to essential budget legislation so that Democrats have to do extra work arguing and negotiating instead of just funding the government. Or, in the case of particularly cowardly Republican Senators, they’re refusing to protect contraception access and abortion rights when Democrats try to bring it up for a vote, as they are unlikely to face consequences for legislation that never passes. Either way, the GOP representatives in power are choosing to conceal, confuse, lie, and stall until they can get the election results that will let them pursue all of it openly—because there will be nothing we can do to stop it.

But the election is still ahead of us right now. So we have time to support ballot initiatives to protect ourselves against Republican efforts to turn states into anti-abortion laboratories, like in Arizona, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Florida. Turn out the vote for candidates who believe in a right to privacy and want to enshrine sex equality into the Constitution instead of fetal personhood. And when your non-political friends wonder about the “softer” GOP anti-abortion policies, tell them the truth: All Donald Trump and Republicans know how to do is lie.