Will Republicans Really Ban Abortion Nationwide?

My congresswoman, Pramila Jayapal, the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is out with an ad for reelection. Her ad is all about abortion, the Democrats’ number-one talking point.

Jayapal, who five years ago wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Story of My Abortion,” opens her ad with that admission about that. By doing this, she primes her listeners to expect frankness. She goes on to declare that if the MAGA Republicans win the Congress in November, they will “absolutely” pass a nationwide ban on abortion, and will also ban in-vitro fertilization and the sale of contraceptives.

Kamala Harris is saying that the Republicans, if elected, will pass a nationwide law banning abortion. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, is also saying it. It’s the party line.

 For years, a nationwide ban on abortion was a part of the Republicans’ national platform. Conservative Christians put the words there. Over the years, they repeatedly grumbled that Republican politicians weren’t taking them seriously and just wanted their votes. Now comes Donald Trump, who removes the anti-abortion promise from the platform.

Is that important? Abortion opponent Patrick T. Brown thinks so. In a guest essay published in the New York Times on July 19, Brown, who is from the of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, complains that the new Republican platform not only drops its call for a national abortion ban, but “makes sure to include positive mentions of birth control and in vitro fertilization.”

In February, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against in-vitro fertilization, Trump disagreed with the decision. He said he supports IVF. And in the June 27 debate, Trump said he would not block the sale of mifepristone, the abortion pill.

On Truthsocial, Trump wrote regarding abortion, “We cannot let our Country suffer any further damage by losing Elections on an issue that should always have been decided by the States, and now will be!” In the debate, he said he was proud that Supreme Court overruled Roe and returned the question to the states.

Trump is sending a signal: No national abortion ban. In essence, what he’s saying to the right-to-lifers is, You wanted abortion law to revert to the states. Be satisfied with what you got.

In politics, half a loaf is a win. To believers in moral absolutes, half a loaf is not acceptable. “The Republican nominee seems all too content to sell out those of us who got into politics to advance policies that protect what we see as human life from its earliest stages,” Patrick Brown writes in the New York Times.

Brown is a believer. Is Donald Trump a believer? It doesn’t seem so. It’s hard to imagine The Donald on his knees, humbling himself before a superior being. He did credit God for his escape from assassination, but it seemed less an expression of piety than of ego.

Has Trump embraced IVF and mifepristone in order to get elected? Yes, of course. But that doesn’t mean his words are worthless. Back in 2016, he promised to lay off cutbacks of Social Security, and he did. To break that promise would have cost him too much. So would accepting a national abortion ban.

The Democrats are the ones who promise to federalize abortion law. Their promise is believable. And maybe it’s a good idea, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually happens. But it’s disingenuous for them to assert, in a tone of certainty, that the Republicans are “absolutely” following the same strategy, when by all appearances they are not.

 Of course, some Republicans would like to ban abortion nationwide. After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, Republican legislators did ban abortion in many of the “red” states, because they thought God and the people were on their side. In regard to the people, they were wrong. Since 2020, abortion law has been on the ballot in Louisiana, Vermont, Michigan, Kentucky, Kansas, California, and Ohio. The anti-abortion side prevailed in only one state out of the seven, Louisiana, which is in the Deep South. In Republican Kansas, which allows abortion up to the 20^th week, only 41 percent of voters sided with the much stricter ban.

Politicians take election results seriously. Voter sentiment is why the Republicans are trying to bury the issue and why the Democrats are flaunting it.

Consider our race for governor. The Democratic front-runner, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, attacks “anti-choice Dave Reichert.” Ferguson’s campaign runs TV ads in which a medical doctor claims, with dark seriousness, that Reichert voted for a national abortion ban “not once, but three times.”

The ad doesn’t mention that the bills Reichert voted for would have banned abortion only after the 20^th week, halfway through the pregnancy, with no ban in case of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life. That’s somewhat more restrictive than Washington’s law, which generally bans abortion at fetal viability, which is the 24^th to 26^th week. Twenty weeks is surely debatable, but it’s nothing like the law in Idaho, which bans it from day one, or the various restrictions now imposed on women in the South.

Reichert is no radical. Despite being the leading Republican candidate for governor, he is not Trumpy enough to get the state party’s endorsement. In the TV commercial he’s running in response to Ferguson’s accusations, he looks into the camera and says, “As Governor I will not change Washington law on this issue because I do not believe any politician regardless of personal belief has the right to make that decision for any woman.”

Is that believable? I think so. Reichert is running statewide, and this has long been an abortion-rights state. In 1970 — three years before Roe v. Wade — Washington became the first state in the union to legalize abortion by public vote. Voters spoke again in 1991 with the same results, and if a vote were held today, the outcome would be no different.

That makes abortion a big stick for Washington Democrats. I recall, some years ago, the Democratic candidate mentioning abortion in the race for land commissioner, and thinking it was pointless for an agency concerned with trees. But it was not pointless: The candidate won.

There is something deeply wrong about this. To boil down election campaigns to one narrow issue, and then lie about it, provides a free pass on everything else. At the federal level, that means letting politicians do what they want about taxing and borrowing, debt and inflation, NATO and the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Cuba and Iran, nuclear weapons, tariffs and trade, climate and environment, Social Security and Medicare, drugs and guns. At the state level it means giving politicians a free pass on property taxes, sales taxes, public schools, highways, climate policy and the price of gasoline.

Voters need to hear about all these things. Politicians don’t. They just need to win. The tried-and-true way to win at the political game, as H.L. Mencken said a century ago, “is to keep the populace alarmed… by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Both parties do this. Right now, the Republican hobgoblin is illegals crossing the border. I could pick on Donald Trump’s gross exaggerations, but I pick on the Democrats instead because I live in a Democratic city in a Democratic state, where the gross exaggerations blasting from my television are, at the moment, all being done by Democrats.