Donald Trump has finally ended speculation over what his policy on the highly contentious issue of abortion will be. Wisely, he won’t be having one.
In a four minute video statement on Monday (Tuesday AEST) the all but confirmed Republican presidential nominee said abortion policy should be left up to individual states, in keeping with the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade.
“Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks or some will have more conservative than others … At the end of the day this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart or in many cases, your religion or your faith,” he said.
It was Trump, a registered Democrat until 2009, at his political best, a radical centrist, not the ‘far right’ (whatever that means) bogey man relentlessly portrayed.
Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence slammed his former boss’s position as a “retreat on the Right to Life” and “a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020”.
But it’s Pence – who support a national abortion ban after six weeks, when many women still don’t even know they are pregnant – who is out of touch with the electorate.
More than half of Americans categories themselves ‘pro-choice’ and a little less than half ‘pro-life’. Over 80 per cent believe abortion should be legal in at least some cases, according to the same Gallup survey from last year.
Almost 60 per cent of voters even in conservative Kansas in August 2022 rejected a constitutional proposal to outlaw abortion, suggesting even in red states the evangelical position isn’t popular and will ultimately crumble throughout the south as religion slowly fades as a political force.
Some polls show a majority of Americans might support a ban after the first trimester, but why give Democrats scope to run a scare campaign leading up the November election? Let the two warring factions battle it out at the state level.
Leaving abortion policy up to each state, as the US constitution clearly envisaged, is the proper conservative position too. Why impose a strait jacket, as Joe Biden has promised if re-elected, on a nation with such diverse – and geographically concentrated – views?
“One in three women in America already live under extreme and dangerous bans that put their lives at risk and threaten doctors with prosecution for doing their jobs,” Joe Biden said in a statement following Trump’s announcement.
But the facts tell a different story. Since the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has in fact increased a little to around 82,300 a month, according to an October analysis by the Society of Family Planning.
To be sure, abortions plunged to practically zero in the 14 states, such as Missouri, Texas and Wisconsin, where total bans emerged. But they soared in other states to more than make up for the decline, suggesting women who wanted an abortion were able to travel to the majority of US states where the practice remains legal.
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