Donald Trump Melts Down Over Abortion

9.23.24

Click to skip ahead: In Republican Panic, Trump is losing it. In the States, news from Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa and more. Anti-Abortion Strategy warns how conservatives are responding to the two abortion ban deaths in Georgia. Ballot Measure Updates has news from Arizona, Florida and Missouri. In 2024 news, Josh Hawley gives up the game. In the Nation, Democrats are asking questions about the hospitals that deny women care. Finally, Today’s Must Read is a deep dive into a South Carolina woman arrested for murder after losing her pregnancy, from KFF Health News.

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Republican Panic

If you thought Donald Trump was panicking on abortion rights before, you haven’t seen anything yet. After Vice President Kamala Harris gave powerful remarks in Georgia about two women who were killed by the state’s abortion ban, the disgraced former president went on a social media tear, writing a nearly-200 all-caps screed about women.

Claiming that American women are doing terribly under the Biden administration, Trump wrote that “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE.”

Trump also insisted that he supports “POWERFUL EXEMPTIONS, LIKE THOSE THAT RONALD REAGAN INSISTED ON—RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER.”

The whole rant has to be read to believed. (Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called his outburst “deranged,” which is exactly right.) Incredibly, Trump repeated all of these claims—nearly word-for-word—at a North Carolina rally this weekend.

Again, it’s not a coincidence that Trump’s sudden concern for women’s well-being exploded just a few hours after Harris laid the deaths of two Georgia women on Trump’s doorstep. There’s also a new NBC poll showing that Trump is trailing Harris by a whopping 21 points among female voters. Harris spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement that Trump “snapped,” and that he “is worried about the power of women in this election.”

He’s not the only one. Fox News is trying to do damage control, too, ‘reporting’ that, “Harris continues to claim that Trump will install a national abortion ban that would allow for no exceptions, despite Trump repeatedly saying that he would never support a national abortion ban.”

Remember: Trump has refused to say whether he’d veto a national abortion ban, and Republicans are playing it fast and loose with what the word ‘ban’ means in order to avoid voters’ ire. We know what would happen if there was another Trump presidency, and no amount of messaging is going to change that reality.

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I’m still thinking about the remarkable speech Kamala Harris gave on abortion rights in Georgia on Friday. If you missed my column about what made it so important, check it below:

Kamala Harris’ Abortion Speech Broke New Ground

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In the States

There’s some good news out of Tennessee, where a judge has blocked portions of a so-called ‘abortion trafficking’ law that makes it illegal to help a minor get an abortion. This will sound familiar to those who read regularly, but I need to repeat it every time: These ‘anti-trafficking’ laws don’t just criminalize taking a minor out of state for an abortion, but make it a crime to help a teen get care in any way, shape or form.

Because the law’s vague language would criminalize anyone who “recruits, harbors, or transports” a minor for an abortion, a grandmother who lends her grandchild gas money to leave the state could be arrested—or an aunt labeled a ‘trafficker’ for texting her niece the url to a clinic. Even pro-choice politicians could be endangered.

In fact, the federal lawsuit was filed by state Rep. Aftyn Behn, who was threatened with arrest by bill sponsor Republican Rep. Jason Zachary. After Rep. Behn voiced her support for helping teens find out-of-state abortion care, Zachary said her comments are “what recruitment looks like.”

So I’m very glad to see that U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger ruled that the state can’t “make it a crime to communicate freely” about abortion options. (A near-identical law in Idaho was also blocked by a judge on free speech grounds.) Rep. Behn responded to the ruling by saying it “doesn’t just protect Tennesseans—it safeguards the freedom to discuss abortion care across state lines, ensuring that we can continue to offer support, share accurate information, and stand up for the rights of those seeking essential health care everywhere.”

In response to the ruling, Rep. Zachary tweeted that the law “is about parental rights, period.” That’s a talking point conservatives have been eager to push out, because they know parental rights are a whole lot more popular than abortion bans, or policies that criminalize even speaking about abortion. But really, let’s remember what these laws actually are: violations of free speech, and travel bans being tested out on minors.

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) sent out an ‘alert’ to the medical community last week, writing that abortion “is permissible at any stage of pregnancy in Florida to save the life and health of the mother.” But the move is more about PR than helping women and doctors.

The alert was sent after the news broke about two women killed by Georgia’s abortion ban, and as the AHCA is mired in controversy. The agency is being sued right now for using taxpayer funding to campaign against Amendment 4, the abortion rights measure heading voters in November.

Like Republicans in other anti-abortion states, Florida’s GOP leadership is desperate to pretend as if their bans aren’t dangerous. But because they’re unwilling to actually change the law to ensure doctors can provide vital care, they’d rather put out press releases saying that everyone is just misunderstanding or misrepresenting the policy. I just wrote last month, for example, about the bizarre video released by South Dakota’s health department that claims to educate doctors about when they can give health- and life-saving care. Instead of offering real guidance, the goal of these statements and videos is to redefine abortion.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I’ve been tracking this tactic since 2022—specifically, the conservative effort to redefine abortion as an intention instead of a medical intervention. Indeed, that term is used in the letter from Florida’s AHCA! The idea is to enshrine a false definition of abortion, one that says treatment for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or danger pregnancies aren’t actually abortions at all. Why go through all that trouble? Because they want to divorce abortion from healthcare. (I reported on this trend in-depth back in February.)

Let’s talk about North Carolina for a minute, because I can’t even believe what’s happening with Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. I’d like to consider myself a jaded feminist, but whew. If you haven’t read this incredible report from CNN—which found that Robinson frequented an online porn forum where he called himself a “Black Nazi”—please make sure to remedy that.

Remember, Robinson is massively anti-abortion; he’s said that women who have abortions just couldn’t “keep their skirts down,” and has made clear he wants a total abortion ban. But apparently that’s the least interesting thing about him!

Not that you needed another reminder that Americans support abortion rights, but I had to highlight this poll out of Iowa. Data from the Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll shows that 59% of Iowans oppose the state’s abortion ban, and that 64% believe that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances.

Quick hits:

• Planned Parenthood of Illinois is bringing procedural abortions back to its Peoria clinic;

• The ‘March for Life’ was in Pennsylvania today;

• And nuns are suing New York over an insurance coverage mandate for reproductive health.

Anti-Abortion Strategy

In the wake of ProPublica’s reporting showing that Georgia’s abortion ban killed at least two women, the anti-abortion movement has been working overtime to shirk blame however they can. I outlined last week how major anti-abortion groups and activists are blaming the victim, claiming that doctors didn’t act fast enough, and insisting that their laws allow for life-saving care. It’s horrific, honestly.

That strategy continued over the weekend and into this week, sparked in part by panic over Harris’ Georgia speech. In addition to Trump’s online meltdown, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that the vice president was “lying” about Amber Nicole Thurman’s death—writing that the young mother died from taking abortion medication. (Which is not true.) Anti-abortion organizations, activists, and publications also claimed over and over that the Georgia deaths had nothing to do with abortion bans—and that the real culprit wasn’t just abortion medication, but pro-choicers.

This is a strategy I started warning about back in 2022. The idea is to claim that abortion rights activists are scaring doctors out of providing legal care, pushing blame onto those working to save women’s lives. Anti-choice OBGYN Ingrid Skop, for example, wrote in an op-ed that “pro-abortion media have unreasonably frightened doctors about when they can intervene in a pregnancy emergency,” and that abortion medication and “misinformation” is killing women. Also today, the editors at the National Review accused Harris of lying and abortion rights activists of “rank scaremongering.”

“If there’s anyone who should have the tragedies in Georgia on their consciences, it is the side of the abortion debate that favors unfettered access to chemical-abortion drugs and seeks to sow confusion about the state of the law.”

Yet another anti-abortion activist writes in Mediate that the issue isn’t bans, but reporting on abortion bans. And I wanted to flag this one because writer Isaac Schorr uses a word that I think we can expect to see a lot. He claims Georgia’s law allows for life-saving care, that there “was no legal barrier” to providing a D&C, and that “no reasonable reading of the law could lead one to believe otherwise.” (Emphasis mine.)

The word ‘reasonable’ stuck out to me in part because anti-abortion powerhouse Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America also used the term in response to the Georgia deaths. In a tweet, the group insists that Georgia’s law “doesn't forbid the surgical removal of an already dead child…No reasonable person who read the plain text of the law would think otherwise.”

So as we see more of these horror stories come out, be on the look out for this kind of language and tactic.

Ballot Measure Updates

We have some great news out of Arizona, where the new New York Times/Sienna College poll shows that 58% of voters support the abortion rights amendment that will be on the ballot in November. Proposition 139, which needs just above 50% of voters’ support to pass, would support abortion rights up until ‘viability.’

Arizona was at the center of the national debate on abortion rights not too long ago, after the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of an 1864 abortion ban. The national backlash was so intense that several Republicans joined Democrats to repeal the law. (Not out of the goodness of their hearts, of course, but because they were pressured by national Republicans who were terrified of what pro-choice anger might mean come November.)

Finally, two quick hits: St. Louis Public Radio breaks down the Missouri Supreme Court decision allowing abortion to remain on the ballot this November; and CBS News with an update on the lawsuit over the lawsuit against Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), which is using taxpayer dollars to campaign against Amendment 4.

2024

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley knows that abortion rights is a problem for him as he fights to hold onto his Missouri seat. That’s why in a Friday debate, the Republican tried to trick voters with a slick language game, saying, “I don’t support a nationwide ban, I do support reasonable federal restrictions.” Which, as you know, are the same thing.

I will harp on this until my deathbed if necessary: You cannot trust Republicans who say they oppose abortion bans, because they are defining ‘ban’ as a law with zero restrictions, even for women’s lives. Remember, JD Vance just tried to play the same trick on Americans in a recent “Meet the Press” interview.

What makes Hawley’s statement so interesting, in particular, has to do with who his wife is. Erin Hawley is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)—the powerful conservative legal group that brought the case that overturned Roe. ADF and Hawley also argued against mifepristone and EMTALA in front of the Supreme Court; so she’s a major leader on this issue.

That’s why the language Josh Hawley uses is so important—he’s getting his anti-abortion bullshit straight from the source. In addition to misleading voters around the word ‘ban,’ Hawley also claimed last week that the abortion rights amendment in Missouri would allow activists to “sterilize” your kids “behind your back.” That’s because he knows that abortion rights are massively popular, and he’s doing the same thing anti-abortion activists have tried in other states: pivoting to anti-trans bigotry.

In the Nation

As the country reels from the news that at least two women were killed by Georgia’s abortion ban, Sen. Ron Wyden is asking whether the hospital that treated Amber Nicole Thurman violated federal law. ProPublica, which broke the news of Thurman’s death, reports that Sen. Wyden has sent a letter to the CEO of Piedmont Henry Hospital asking for information about whether the hospital has delayed or denied emergency care to pregnant patients:

“I am committed to ensuring that all people are able to fully realize their right to emergency medical care, including reproductive health care. Post Dobbs, it is essential that pregnant patients and their families have the peace of mind that they will be able to receive the necessary, stabilizing care they need and providers are able to deliver appropriate emergency care without fear of personal or professional liability.”

Wyden cites the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) in the letter, the federal law that requires hospital emergency rooms to give life-saving and stabilizing care, including abortions. (The law that conservatives are trying to gut, because they’re so ‘pro-life.’) The Oregon Senator, who is chair of the Senate Finance Committee, also sent letters to hospitals North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas—including the hospital that treated Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, who died in 2022.

Quick hits:

• I was profiled by Agence France-Presse this week in anticipation of my new book;

• Bloomberg Law on how abortion bans worsen racial disparities in maternal health;

• CNN looks at how anti-abortion promises to support women and families post-Roe have fallen (far) short;

• And a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that most Hispanic Americans support abortion rights, with 6 in 10 Hispanic Protestants and two-thirds of Hispanic Catholics saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

“Reproductive justice will only be achieved if the needs of LGBTQIA+ folks are centered and considered to be a vital piece of the advocacy puzzle, because our rights are tied up with one another. When a trans man is able to receive unimpeded access to birth control, so will a cisgender woman. When a queer couple is able to adopt a child, then adoption for all families will be easier to access. And when a queer person is able to work in an office without sexual or gender discrimination, all people in that workplace benefit.”

-Candace Bond-Theriault, The Nation

Today’s Must-Read

Please make sure to read KFF Health News’ story on Amari Marsh, the South Carolina woman who was arrested and charged with murder after losing her pregnancy. I wrote about Marsh’s experience a bit last week, pointing out that it follows the very predictable pattern that we see in pregnancy criminalization across the board.

Indeed, Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, tells KFF Health News that Marsh’s case is a “prime example of how pregnancy loss can become a criminal investigation very quickly.” Marsh, a young Black woman, was arrested on a charge seemingly unrelated to abortion: “homicide by child abuse.” She was subsequently vilified by local and conservative media, which claimed “Orangeburg Newborn Dies in Toilet.”

“It was heartbreaking to see all those things,” Marsh told KFF. “I cried so many times.”

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because the attacks against Marsh are very similar to the attacks against Brittany Watts—the Ohio woman arrested for ‘abuse of a corpse’ after flushing her miscarriage. Watts’ pregnancy loss was also covered by local media as a crime story, with headlines declaring she had shoved her baby down the toilet. Like Marsh, Watts is Black.

And while both women had the charges against them dropped or cleared, their lives have been forever altered. The suffering and harm doesn’t stop when the prosecution does.

Reading stories like this makes me feel ill; I’m sure the same is true for you. But it’s incredibly important that we bear witness to the consequences of anti-abortion laws and support the publications doing justice to women’s stories. So please read the full piece.