Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions: in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deliberations from Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump has carefully avoided taking a clear position on abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned in mid-2022, rattling Democrats ahead of this year’s midterm elections. He said privately that he wanted to wait until the end of the Republican presidential primary to discuss his views publicly because he didn’t want to risk angering social conservatives before he secured the nomination, the two people said.
Mr. Trump has taken a transactional approach to the issue of abortion since he ran for office in 2015, and his current private conversations reflect the same approach.
One thing Mr. Trump likes about a 16-week federal ban on abortion is that it is a round number. “You know what I like about 16?” Mr. Trump told one of those people, who were granted anonymity, to describe a private conversation. “It’s just now. It’s been four months.”
When it comes to potential vice presidential candidates, Mr. Trump often asks if they “agree with abortion.” He is immediately dismissive when he hears a Republican not supporting “the three exceptions.” He tells aides that Republicans will continue to lose elections with this position.
When the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade overturned, Mr. Trump told advisers that he believed the decision would hurt Republicans. He has since come to believe that the abortion issue is largely responsible for a series of Republican defeats in congressional elections.
And he is acutely aware of his own vulnerability: he appointed the three judges who made this decision possible, a fact he has publicly claimed as his own in several cases. These statements have already been included in ads, and Democrats plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to remind voters of this fact.
By supporting a 16-week ban, Mr. Trump would seek to please both social conservatives who want to further restrict access to abortion and Republican and independent voters who want more modest restrictions on the procedure.
Abortions are currently banned in 20 states at various stages of pregnancy before 16 weeks, including Florida, Mr. Trump’s home state. The type of ban Mr. Trump has discussed privately would restrict abortion rights beyond that point in the remaining 30 states where it is legal. And the question of exceptions limited to the life of the mother is also controversial. In Texas, state courts have ruled that women are not entitled to the limited exemptions for “life-threatening conditions” related to pregnancy, even if their fetus had a serious diagnosis and the woman’s future fertility and health were at risk.
In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, did not address his private comments.
“As President Trump has stated, he would sit down with both sides and negotiate a deal that everyone will be happy with,” Ms. Leavitt said, adding that he has “appointed strong constitutionalist federal judges and Supreme Court justices who have rejected Roe vs. Wade,” and sent the decision back to the states, something others have tried to do for over 50 years.” She attacked President Biden and congressional Democrats as being overly permissive on abortion.
Mr. Trump, who has described himself as an abortion rights supporter for most of his adult life, announced in early 2011, as he was considering running for president in the Republican primary, that he now opposed abortion.
Yet Mr. Trump never seemed comfortable discussing it. In early 2016, Mr. Trump said in an interview with television host Chris Matthews that there needed to be “some form of punishment” for women who had illegal abortions, a comment his campaign quickly walked back.
Back then, Mr. Trump had to convince skeptical social conservatives that he would implement anti-abortion policies and select socially conservative judges, and he chose a deeply conservative vice president, Mike Pence, to help him do the convincing.
Since then, Mr. Trump has implemented this, building a strong connection of his own with evangelical voters so that he feels less of a need to pander to them. After Roe was overturned, Republicans struggled to find ways to talk about abortion because they can no longer simply say they are against it. The concept of a national abortion ban has come into focus, with a 15-week federal abortion ban emerging as the foundation many anti-abortion activists have set for Republican candidates.
A 16-week ban wouldn’t stop many abortions: According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 94 percent of abortions occur before 13 weeks of pregnancy. Such a ban is also not based on medical research. There are still 15 weeks to go before extensive tests are carried out in a pregnancy to check the fetus for rare – but potentially fatal – diseases. Instead, it has become a position that some Republicans believe, based on polls, will be the most politically acceptable to voters.
An AP/NORC poll released in July 2023, a year after Roe was overturned, found that a slim majority supported a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In the poll, Democrats overwhelmingly supported such a measure, while Republicans overwhelmingly opposed it. A six-week ban drew poor support from a majority of Americans, including Republicans, while a majority of Americans did not support allowing abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, according to the poll.
One of Mr. Trump’s allies, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, introduced a bill in 2022 that would impose a 15-week ban on abortion, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother after that period.
Mr. Trump has never supported the bill, which other prominent Republicans have distanced themselves from, and he said only last fall that the decision should be left to the states. A leading anti-abortion group criticized him for that statement, but its leader was placated after a meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Graham.
There are signs that a national ban of any kind is unpopular among broad swaths of independent voters and potentially risky for Mr. Trump. In Virginia, for example, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s attempts to rally voters to what his campaign called a “15-week limit” failed last November, and Democrats outperformed expectations in the state’s general election.
In this Republican nominating contest, where primary voters typically reward candidates for opposing abortion rights, Mr. Trump has so far avoided answering the question of whether he would support a nationwide ban. Instead, he talks about abortion as if it were a real estate transaction. He is credited with giving abortion opponents “great bargaining power.”
“What will happen is that there will be agreement over several weeks or months,” Trump said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in September. “You’re going to come up with a number that will make people happy.”
At a Fox News town hall event in January, a week before the Iowa caucuses, a social conservative voter asked Mr. Trump to “assure me” that he would protect “every person’s right to life without compromise.”
Mr. Trump declined to reassure them. “I love where you come from,” he told the voter. “But we still have to win elections. And they took advantage of this – you know, we have some great Republicans, and they’re great on this issue, and you would love them on this issue. And many of them were just decimated in the election.”
Mr. Trump even went so far as to criticize as “horrible” the six-week abortion ban signed by his former Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Mr. DeSantis sought to capitalize on the commentary in socially conservative Iowa. “I don’t know how you can even say you’re pro-life when you’re criticizing states for adopting protections for babies with heartbeats,” he told Radio Iowa shortly after Mr. Trump made those comments in September had . “I think if he goes into this and says he’s going to make Democrats happy on the right to life, then I think all pro-life advocates should know that he’s preparing to betray you. “
But conservative voters let Mr. Trump through and ultimately won a record victory in Iowa.
Mr. Trump was emboldened by the lack of backlash and privately went further by blaming more Republican hardliners for the party’s election losses. He has repeatedly criticized two losing 2022 gubernatorial candidates — Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — for squandering winnable elections by being too “hard right” on abortion and not allowing enough exceptions.
Mr. Trump has told advisers and allies that he wants to try to put a positive spin on the abortion issue by talking about what he called a “radical Democratic” position of supporting late-term abortions, which, while rare, are uncomfortable for many people significant number of Americans.
Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.
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2024-02-16 18:31:42
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