(RNS) — Forgive me, but I’m still getting my head around the Republican Party adopting a platform that abandons anti-abortion positions it has sworn fealty to for decades.
Sure, I know abortion has been a losing electoral issue for the GOP since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. And that Candidate Trump has sought to get around this liability by dumping all responsibility for abortion policy onto the states.
Still, it’s not as if the party’s positions ever enjoyed anything like majority support in America. Or as if a Republican presidential candidate had never tried to change the platform’s abortion plank — and run into a pro-life buzzsaw for his pains.
To understand the magnitude of the shift, let’s review the GOP’s anti-abortion bidding.
The 1976 Platform, the first after Roe was decided, called abortion “one of the most difficult and controversial of our time” and favored “a continuance of the public dialogue” on the subject. But it moved toward an anti-abortion stance by declaring its support for “the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.”
Thanks to the emergence of the national religious right, that stance became more robust in the 1980 Platform, with the party now saying “we affirm our support” of a constitutional amendment as well as supporting congressional restrictions on public funding of abortions. It also pledged to “work for the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.”
It was the 1984 Platform that added the assertion that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed” and, to back that up, endorsed legislation “to make clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children” — which would effectively turn embryos and fetuses into legal persons.
There things stayed until 1996, when the party’s presidential candidate, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, sought to change the platform’s proposed constitutional amendment to allow abortions in cases of rape, incest and danger to the mother’s life. In this he had the backing of Ralph Reed, then executive director of the then-preeminent Christian Coalition.
But after furious pushback from the rest of the anti-abortion community, the three exceptions never made their way into the platform. The most Dole could achieve was language recognizing that “members of our party have deeply held and sometimes differing views … and we welcome into our ranks all Americans who may hold differing positions.” That language disappeared in the 2000 Platform, never to return.
Instead, subsequent GOP presidential candidates danced away from the issue by saying that the country was not yet ready for the platform’s constitutional ban — thereby establishing a modus vivendi with pro-lifers that lasted until the Supreme Court made abortion into a big electoral issue for pro-choicers.
Which brings us to last month’s 2024 Platform. There, abortion is the issue that dare not speak its name except once, in announcing the party’s opposition to “Late Term Abortion.”
Beyond that, there are only the most oblique references to the subject: support for the appointment of judges who respect “defending the Rights of all Americans to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; a stance “for families and Life”; and a belief that the 14th Amendment “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.”
And, lest anyone think otherwise, the GOP for the first time declares its support for both birth control and IVF. Take that, Alabama Supreme Court!
At his press conference Thursday (Aug. 8), Candidate Trump made clear just how much he doesn’t want to assume pro-life positions this election cycle, refusing to say how he would vote on Florida’s upcoming referendum guaranteeing abortion rights. And, having said in his debate with President Biden that he approved of the Supreme Court’s refusal to ban the abortion drug mifepristone and that he wouldn’t do anything to ban it as president, he insisted in response to a reporter’s question on Thursday that Americans should be able to vote on the question. Say what?
None of the above is meant to suggest that the strong Republican desire to do away with abortion nationwide has disappeared. The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project, which remains a powerful indicator of what a future Trump administration would do notwithstanding Trump’s public disavowal of it, contains a long series of specific recommendations on how to strip support for abortion rights from the federal government — including via a ban on mifepristone.
One can presume that the pro-life community has been assured that under Trump 2.0 the federal anti-abortion agenda will proceed apace. Why else would it have issued only muted squawks when the 2024 Platform was unveiled?
