Trump and Vance’s Word Games on Abortion

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance support a national ban on abortion. They are just calling it something else.

Since the justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court provided the conservative majority necessary to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, women in Republican-controlled states have been forced to flee their homes in order to receive lifesaving care. Some women have died or were treated only at the brink of death. Contrary to the carefully cultivated stereotype, most of the women who seek abortions are already mothers, meaning that many of these women who died left behind children who will never see their mom again.

For these reasons and others—including the invasive, gender-based state surveillance and control required to outlaw abortion—these bans have become unpopular, even in most conservative states. Trump, who is more responsible than any other individual for their existence, has delicately sought to present a more moderate position on abortion rights to voters, while quietly reassuring the anti-abortion movement that, if elected again, he will continue to do their bidding. This is why, for example, Trump altered the GOP platform on abortion to remove the call for a federal abortion ban, yet inserted more convoluted language that insists that abortion rights are unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. The position that the Constitution already outlaws abortion is even more extreme than the position that Congress can and should outlaw it.

Trump and Vance do think Congress should outlaw it too. Vance said as much during the vice-presidential debate with the Democratic nominee, Tim Walz. He simply debuted a new euphemism for it, saying he merely supported a “minimum national standard” on abortion. That is just another phrase meaning “abortion ban.”

“I never supported a national ban. I did, during when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard,” Vance told the CBS News moderator Norah O’Donnell.

So first of all, that was a lie. Vance has said not only that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” but also that he would be “sympathetic” to outlawing interstate travel for women seeking abortions. In classic Vance style, he didn’t use the word outlaw, of course; what he instead said was: “some federal response to prevent it from happening.” Regardless, the result would be pregnant women dying of septic shock in emergency rooms where doctors refuse to treat them for fear of being prosecuted. Vance has even opposed the narrow exceptions to abortion bans for rape and incest, on the grounds that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

[From the November 2024 issue: The rise of the right wing tattletale]

But more important, a “national minimum standard” is just another phrase for federal abortion ban, like calling soccer “football” instead. Although Vance did not specify a window of time for such a standard, the only point of one would be to ban abortion outside it.

Trump has been playing word games too. During the debate, he put out a post on his social-media accounts asserting that he would veto a federal ban, while implying that he believes abortion should be illegal after the seventh month—a relatively popular position—adding, “I FULLY SUPPORT THE THREE EXCEPTIONS FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER.”

As the writer Jessica Valenti points out, this is curious phrasing, and suggests that Trump and Vance have redefined abortion ban to mean “abortion bans that do not contain exceptions.” “Under this definition,” Valenti notes, “there are no abortion bans in America!” Already, very few women qualify for such exceptions in Republican-controlled states. The exceptions are there to retain popular support for the bans, but so legally vague as to ensure that doctors are afraid to provide lifesaving abortions to patients who need them.

Similarly, Trump’s position on vetoing a specific type of abortion ban has not disturbed anti-abortion activists, because they do not expect such a ban to pass Congress anyway. Instead, they believe that if Trump wins, he will use his executive powers to go around Congress to make abortion effectively inaccessible nationwide, while saying that this does not count as banning abortion.

This is not merely my interpretation—anti-abortion activists said as much following Trump’s proclamation about not supporting a congressionally authorized federal ban. As the president of the National Right to Life Committee, Carol Tobias, told the Associated Press, “Unless something really unusual happens in this election, neither side is going to have the votes in Congress to pass a national law … So that wasn’t really at the top of our list anyway.”

What is on their list? As my colleague Elaine Godfrey reported last year, Trump could use the Department of Justice to prosecute companies that ship abortion medication, which is used in two-thirds of abortions. Given that the available data show that 99 percent of abortions happen before 20 weeks, a ban on such medication would drastically limit the ability of women to get abortions early on, notwithstanding Trump’s misleading position that he thinks it should be illegal only after the seventh month. Anti-abortion activists hope Trump will ban medical supplies that could be used in abortions, which would also affect the ability of doctors to provide lifesaving care in other medical situations. He could also order the DOJ to prosecute abortion providers based on the archaic Comstock Act, which once made it illegal to send porn or condoms through the mail, and which conservative legal activists and judges want to revive to ban abortion. In a second administration, Trump will also appoint more anti-abortion judges—and potentially justices—who would uphold abortion bans, and possibly hold abortion rights to be unconstitutional and therefore unlawful in any state, as the Republican platform demands.

Trump, and the conservative-activist elite that Vance hails from, have a clear plan for limiting women’s access to abortion should they win in November. This could take the form of a congressionally authorized ban if Republicans have a big enough majority, which Trump and Vance would simply refer to as a “minimum national standard.” Or it could take the form of the detailed plan for going around Congress, which anti-abortion activists have been touting for the past few years. But one way or another, banning abortion everywhere is the plan, which is why anti-abortion activists are not discouraged by Trump and Vance’s word games.

Vance did not actually shift his position on abortion. He did try to hide his real views behind a false empathy, saying, “We’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust.” His first attempt at “earning back people’s trust” on abortion was to lie to them about what he believes.