As TPM has been reporting since Roe’s overturning: The electoral backlash to the Dobbs ruling has Republicans — especially 2024 Republicans — queasy about staking out a position on abortion. And no one has been more vague about what abortion policy they’d support as president than Donald Trump.
“Disdain For DeSantis May Force Trump To Actually Land Somewhere On Abortion.”
The Sméagol has landed.
Clip resurfaces of Donald Trump saying women who get abortions should face ‘some form of punishment’
The clip resurfaced on Twitter amid the news surrounding a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion suggesting Roe v. Wade may be overturned.
They still have no business getting into the decision.
Supporting a national policy that allows for abortions up to 15 weeks is nothing short of an admission by Republicans that for 40 years they have been playing/lying to those who vote on for them because they want all abortion illegal.
Noting that 93%+ of all abortions are performed in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, such a position says to the anti abortion voters, those who for over 40 years have been supporting Republicans because of this one issue and in spite of the fact that on economic and other issues Republican policies hurt them and their values, that in fact Republicans were never serious about outlawing abortion.
In short for Republicans like Trump and the rest to now say they support keeping abortion legal for the first 15 weeks of pregnancy is an admission that “values” in front of the word voter is and has always been code for race.
I completely agree with this.
To say that there should be any limits on abortion is to say women are not capable of making decisions about what to do with their own bodies which also makes them inferior to men.
I mean to anyone who thinks that any woman after carrying a baby for 7 or months makes air head decision to terminate her pregnancy is either to arrogant to actually know any woman and I don’t care how long they have been married or how many wives they may have had.
Of course, that was one of his rare moments of ignorant truth-speaking. The anti-abortion contingent has always been two-faced and oxymoronic on the subject. They want to punish the procedure, but somehow claim the women who attempt to have the procedure are still blameless. They always target the doctors and nurses and the people who assist the woman before or afterwards.
Yet somehow, they want to say the woman isn’t to blame (she apparently doesn’t have the agency to make the decision she clearly made). So Trump was just ignorantly taking the issue to its actual logical conclusion: if the procedure is “bad,” then the women who get one should be punished as well as everyone else involved. He lacked the nuance to understand that their position is farcical (if it weren’t so dehumanizing and harmful) and just tried to ape the conclusion that their position actually demands.
I really wish someone with an economic background would run the numbers on how much an increase in births in individual states will increase the costs associated with all these newly born babies. How many will be given up for adoption, how many more pediatricians, school teachers, daycare centers, and the like will be needed.
In recent weeks, some Republicans made it clear they plan to take their chances on a 15-week nationwide ban. People like Mike Pence and Glenn Younkin, for example, are betting that Republican voters who have reacted aversely to extreme bans on the procedure in red states, may see the 15-week approach as more humane than the type of universal bans with no exceptions that have long been associated with the supposed “pro-life” movement.
This is just an admission that Republicans can read polls and understand that their preferred policy (6-week “heartbeat” bans) is widely unpopular (from Gallup):
Note that voters opposed 6-week abortion bans by about 20-points even before Dobbs. Similarly, a ban on abortion after 18-weeks (closest to their proposed 15-week ban) is also unpopular by about 15-points before Dobbs.
Most ominously for Republicans, is that the percentage of voters ‘totally satisfied’ with our abortion laws has dropped to a two-decade low (in the mid-20s), while the percentage who are ‘dissatisfied and want less strict’ abortion laws has jumped up to nearly half.
In fact, support for ‘wanting less strict’ abortion laws was never the top choice until after Roe v Wade was overturned. I don’t think I’ve ever seen cause-and-effect so cleanly displayed in polling data (meaning the impact is large enough to overcome the normal fluctuations in the polling).
None of this is going to help Trump because, no matter what policy position of the week he supports, he’s not running away from statements like this:
I’m thinking the argument is exactly how much of the camel do we want in everyone’s tent. It’s not only women who have a privacy intrest to loose.
Today’s GOP: “A Chicken in Every Pot!” “A Camel in Every Uterus!”
Closest I can find is the following on unintended pregnancies (the numbers from 2010):
U.S. government expenditures on births, abortions and miscarriages resulting from unintended pregnancies nationwide totaled $21 billion in 2010, according to “Public Costs from Unintended Pregnancies and the Role of Public Insurance Programs in Paying for Pregnancy-Related Care: National and State Estimates for 2010,” by Adam Sonfield and Kathryn Kost. In 19 states, public expenditures related to unintended pregnancies exceeded $400 million in 2010. Texas spent the most ($2.9 billion), followed by California ($1.8 billion), New York ($1.5 billion) and Florida ($1.3 billion); those four states are also the nation’s most populous.
But I honestly don’t feel like an economic ‘cost-benefit’ analysis is really appropriate here. We should be willing to spend the necessary public resources to safely raise children no matter their origin.
But to force women through 9-months of a potentially health and life-threatening situation against their will - that is truly cruel:
This was not intended to be a direct response to your comment, @noonm. I was making a general point and hadn’t realized I’d hit reply to your comment.
Of, FFS, can we please get beyond trying to pretend Trump has a position on anything beyond 1) whatever he thinks sounds good at that specific moment, 2) will weaken some perceived enemy (i.e, whoever his boogeyman of the day is) and/or 3) will rake in the most money from the rubes.
There is no policy! And no reading of tea leaves will decipher a policy!
His answers are all some form of, “Only I can solve this, and it will be beautiful for everyone. A perfect solution! Give me power and I’ll take care of it in a day. But why would I tell you now about my big, beautiful solution?”
On those occasions where he’s feeling pinched, encountering the rare journalist who doesn’t grovel as stenographer, he’ll simply toss out a crumb, claiming details will be forthcoming in a couple of weeks.
PS - Edited to add, there may be one guiding light – One can always count on Trump to pursue the most authoritarian course of action, just as he embraces other authoritarian powers to his own benefit.
Disdain For DeSantis
If TDIFFG is the front-runner, he’s the front-runner. He doesn’t have to land anywhere and anywhere he might seem to land will turn out to be a lie.
Republicans will vote for him like good little soldiers.
And independents? All it will take is a non-scandal about aliases or age or emails, dropped in October 2024, by some MSM outfit looking to boost their ad revenue…
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that Trump has no true ‘policy’ beyond what he can use to scam his supporters or attack his perceived enemies.
But there is still value towards accusing him of having a widely unpopular policy position and watch him double-down by declaring “yes, I do support that!”
My intent was to prepare the people in states like MO that there will be cost to all us. There are people now complaining that they can’t find childcare, not even just affordable childcare.
Then there’s the hit to public schools. MO is battling over school vouchers, which means cuts to public education.
And of course programs like WIC and SNAP.
I just now edited my comment to point out my mistake. I accidentally hit reply to your comment instead of adding a new, separate comment. I agree completely with your points.
An NPR article from 2017 suggests that the cost of abstinence only sex-ed in Texas was roughly $1.1B per year*. Another article from the same time that the additional cost for the Texas education system was $300M per year. I can only imagine how much those costs go up when women can’t get an abortion.
*Teen Pregnancy Rates Remain Stubbornly High In Some Parts Of Texas : Shots - Health News : NPR
I understand the intent, but I don’t think it will be persuasive to either side.
Democrats will say regardless of the costs, abortion should be legal. Also, we should funds those activities (e.g. childcare, public schools, WIC, SNAP, etc) anyways.
Republicans have always rationalized the disconnect between their pro-forced birth position with their lack of support of post-birth public resources by pushing more marriage and more religion. Here is an example of the latter argument:
Rather than focusing on wealth transfers to the poor, we should seek to cultivate conditions that enable people to flourish through their own actions and relationships. When evaluating policies, we should ask: Does it give people an incentive to stay together, or does it subsidize their breaking apart? Does it encourage one particular kind of childcare, or does it enable all mothers to better care for their children in the way that they choose?
Basically, marriage (and women forced into raising children) is the solution to the paradox in their minds.
Increased costs will sway exactly no one and risks disingenuous attacks on pro-choice supporters for ‘trying to balance government budgets by killing babies.’ Best to avoid going down that route.
It’s just in my neck of the woods that our state lege controlled by Republicans have not thought through what their near total ban on abortion will mean.
All these mostly men who have never given birth, probably never been to all the appointments that their wives had to go to while they were pregnant, who haven’t clarified their actions in regards to women who had no intention of aborting their fetus except now the pregnancy has turned into health problem for the woman. There’s no urgency to clarify their non-medical instructions.
Hell they don’t even seem to have an inkling on why rural hospitals are closing is going to do their constituents, pregnant or not pregnant.
“What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months,” Trump said, adding that it would result in “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”
Seems that I’ve seen something about an abortion policy that “[came] up with a number of weeks or months.” I think it was a Supreme Court decision known as Roe v Wade. According to Trump that should have brought peace on the issue 50 years ago, but the GOP found a political gold mine pandering to its fundamentalist base until its hand picked Supreme Court actually did what the politicians were content to keep as a campaign issue.
