Don't Fall for the GOP's Platform Lie
The abortion plank is extreme, no matter what the headlines say
A leaked draft of the new Republican party platform says that fetuses have a constitutional right to personhood, a radical stance in a moment when Americans overwhelmingly oppose bans and want abortion to be legal. And despite headlines to the contrary, the GOP’s abortion plank still supports a national ban.
But because political reporters and mainstream news outlets have fallen for a Republican disinformation campaign, the platform’s new language is being covered as a ‘softening’ on abortion rights.
The stakes are high so I’m not going to mince words: This is about as big of a fuck up as it gets. So let’s get into it.
Here’s the new abortion plank in its entirety:
Republicans Will Protect and Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States, on the Issue of Life
We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).
The GOP’s platform has invoked the Fourteenth Amendment for years for a reason. As law professor Liz Sepper tweeted today, it “commits to constitutional personhood for fetuses…[and] takes the view that it is not a mere statute but rather the constitution that bans abortion nationwide.”
While the platform calls for constitutional protections for fetuses, it also claims that abortion is a state’s rights issue—a clear contradiction. After all, the Fourteenth Amendment says “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Law professor Greer Donley tells Abortion, Every Day that it “makes no sense.”
“It sounds like they are playing both sides, preserving the most extreme position—personhood—for their base, while also only outright opposing ‘late-term abortion’ to reassure the middle.”
Sounds like the Trump campaign to me!
What’s also noteworthy is the language opposing “late term abortion,” which shifts weight away from Republicans’ ‘state’s rights’ promise.
If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve been tracking how anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are increasingly defining ‘late’ abortion as anything after the first trimester. And because ‘late abortion’ isn’t a real medical term, they can define and redefine it at will. I pointed out last year, for example, that president of March for Life Action Jeanne Mancini wrote an op-ed characterizing ending a pregnancy after 12 weeks as “dangerous and extreme late-term abortions.” Also last year, the Charlotte Lozier Institute published a paper arguing for a national 15 week ban by calling it a “Federal Limit on Late Abortion.”
The timing wasn’t a coincidence: with Republicans pushing 15-week bans both nationally and in the states, the anti-abortion movement was slickly trying to define these policies as bans on only ‘late’ abortions.
It’s not difficult to see how this translates to the GOP’s new platform, which promises to “oppose Late Term Abortion.” In combination with the language about constitutional protections for fetuses, it’s reasonable to read the platform as a vow to push for a national ban on ‘late’ abortion—again, which the GOP can define however they’d like.
In other words, despite media claims that Republicans removed support for a national ban in platform, I’d argue that they very much did not. The language is vague and obfuscates, yes. But that’s deliberate. It’s also why Trump’s campaign and conservative activists worked so hard to play the media before this new platform was released.
How We Got Here
A little over a week ago, anti-abortion leaders told reporters that they had written a letter to Donald Trump, urging him not to weaken the platform's stance on abortion. This letter coincided with complaints from anti-abortion activists about being excluded from the GOP platform's writing committee and concerns that support for a national ban might be removed from the platform.
All of those stories were part of a well-planned media narrative from conservatives to set the stage for today’s platform leak. So now, instead of focusing on the document’s anti-abortion extremism, the press is covering the platform as a fight between the Trump campaign and hardline anti-abortion conservatives. Even worse, it’s being painted as a sign that the disgraced former president wants to temper Republicans’ extremist stance on abortion.
None of that is true. Changing the platform’s language on abortion is solely a strategic move for November. In fact, I literally warned yesterday that Trump’s campaign would change the platform in order to pretend that the disgraced former president is pushing the party to ‘soften’ on abortion. It’s a tactic to win over women voters who are pissed off about abortion bans, and to get press coverage that makes Trump look as if he’s the ‘reasonable’ Republican on abortion rights.
It doesn’t change a single thing about what Trump would do if elected, nor does it mean that there’s an actual rift between his campaign and the anti-abortion movement. This is political theater, and the mainstream press is handing out programs.
The New York Times’ headline today declares, “Trump Presses G.O.P. for Platform Draft That Softens Stance on Abortion,” while The Washington Post says, “Trump proposes scaled back platform that softens language on abortion.” Forbes’ headline reads, “RNC Drops Call for National Abortion Ban After 40 Years,” and POLITICO’s says, “RNC committee approves dropping national limits on abortion from party platform.”
How is it possible that reporters are still falling for this?
Even if journalists didn’t catch on that the platform supports national restrictions, any reporter covering this issue knows that Trump doesn’t need a national law to ban abortion across the country. The plan—which conservatives have explicitly admitted on paper—is to use the Comstock Act to enact a national backdoor ban and federal agency takeovers to make abortion impossible to get in every state.
They also have to realize that Trump would absolutely sign a national ban should it cross his desk no matter what the platform says! We all know that what Trump promises never dictates what he actually does.
And despite the grandstanding from seemingly-frustrated anti-abortion leaders, these are people who have long expressed confidence that Trump will come through with whatever they need once he’s in office. So when you see Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser feign frustration over this new platform in a quote at The Washington Post, please know that she’s simply playing up the idea of behind-the-scenes Republican infighting in order to help Trump. She’s giving reporters the color their stories need to further the false narrative that Trump is somehow bucking the anti-abortion system, even as he gives them everything they want.
After all, activists like Dannenfelser know—as political reporters should also know—that the people who drafted this new GOP platform are anti-abortion extremists. Take Russ Vought, for example, who is the policy director of the GOP platform writing committee. Not only did Vought help to write Project 2025, but he’s a favorite among some of the most extremist anti-abortion organizations in the country: Students for Life called him “Trump’s most pro-life cabinet member.”
And Ed Martin, who also wrote the GOP’s supposedly ‘softened’ platform, supports a national abortion ban without exceptions, has entertained arresting abortion patients, and claims that abortions are never needed to save a woman’s life. If you had any doubt that he brought those views into the room with him when drafting the GOP’s new platform, consider that Martin promised in a podcast interview just last month that “the platform will respect life in every moment.”
Heather Digby Parton gets it exactly right at Salon:
“These men are hardcore Christian nationalists who are involved in the planning for a second Trump term. And they are very practical about doing whatever it takes to regain power for that purpose. A little fudging on the platform, letting the Republicans pretend to the mainstream press that they aren't radical in order to win over some of those valuable suburban moms is just the price of doing business.”
In short: they know what they’re doing and today, people fell for it. By reporting that the GOP’s new platform is somehow weak on abortion rights, media outlets are giving the Trump campaign exactly what it needs—an inroad to Republican women voters.
What makes all of this extra frustrating is that this isn’t the first time that mainstream publications have fallen for it. It isn’t even the tenth time. I think often about what happened when Trump went on “Meet the Press” and insisted that abortion providers “kill the baby after birth” seven different times. NBC News followed up with this headline: “Trump Wants to Bring the Country Together on Abortion.”
Now that Trump got the coverage that his campaign needed to so badly, anti-abortion activists can stop pretending to be mad at him. Today Dannenfelser released a statement saying the platform “remains strongly pro-life at the national level,” and lauded the GOP for mentioning the Fourteenth Amendment. Student for Life president Kristan Hawkins also celebrated, saying the platform guaranteed constitutional “legal protection for the preborn.”
The only people who lost today? Us.
Thank you. The only decent reporting so far is from the 19th (which itself did a bad job on reporting the EMTALA decision). Compare their reporting to NYT, NPR and you wonder what the hell is going on. How can the media outlets be so incredibly dumb? Or are they trying to help Republicans deceive voters? I am actually increasingly suspicious of the NYT.
This platform calls for fetal personhood. If a fetus is a person, women are incubators who can and will be charged for killing or harming that person, on purpose or accidentally. We already see the law being perverted to go after women for miscarriages (eg Brittany Watts) and this is in a world where fetuses are NOT persons under the law. Establishing fetal personhood will not only prohibit women from being able to terminate a pregnancy but will be used to deny them ANY healthcare that might harm that “other person.” Chemotherapy? Nope. Medicine for your dental cavity? Nope. Pregnant women are already denied dental treatment. Vision saving emergency care like Jessica’s recent guest author needed? Nope (and already denied even without fetal personhood). Republicans are trying to put us in a world where pregnant women have to fight for and justify every medical intervention. I mean our courts are already debating - DEBATING - whether pregnant women can have life saving care. In some not too distant future we are going to see more cases going after treatments we haven’t even thought of or heard of.
Nicole Wallace covered this topic today (his lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025 and about abortion) with a pretty good panel (Angelo Carusone made the most contribution in the discussion, IMO); she called it shaving the corners off, softening the stance and not to believe it. As for the mfers at NYT (God, I loathe the sight of Peter Baker!) and other places, I don't know. They have gone berserk going after Biden making shit up and putting everyone of us and the country in danger.