The new Republican stance on abortion isn’t as strong as it once was. The Republican National Committee, at Donald Trump’s urging, adopted a platform this summer that for the first time in 40 years opposed a national abortion ban.
Unlike previous GOP platforms, the new one did not mention fetal viability as a standard for regulating abortion.
Though many within the party support national restrictions at some level, Trump has remained consistent in support of the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that returned control of abortion to the states.
Just last week Trump’s wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, passionately defended a woman’s right to abortion in advance of her upcoming book.
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” writes Melania Trump in her memoir, The Guardian reports.
The Guardian further portrayed Trump’s position that states should determine abortion laws as a “threat to women’s reproductive rights” which has played a central role in Trump’s White House run against Kamala Harris.
Democrats, enacting a strategy of changing state constitutions one by one, have pumped money into abortion as a campaign issue since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
Trump consistent with states’ stance
But through the campaign rhetoric, Trump, and now running mate J.D. Vance, have remained consistent in the position that the federal government should not decide the abortion issue … which makes Vance’s weekend comments following the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania interesting.
“On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood, look, I mean our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions,” Vance told reporters. “That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around. It will remain a consistent view.”
According to the most recent data from the Government Accountability Office, Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions, received $1.78 billion in government funding between 2019-2021.
Mary Szoch, the Family Research Council’s director for the Center for Human Dignity, said on Washington Watch Tuesday that Planned Parenthood operates under false pretenses.
“This is a horrific organization that profits off the death of unborn babies, off killing unborn babies. They market themselves as an organization that does mammograms and whatever other screenings. In reality, what they’re doing is killing unborn babies. Their number of breast cancer screenings has decreased by 81% since 1999. That’s not an organization that’s focused on the healthcare of Americans. That’s an organization that’s focused on its wallet,” she told show host Jody Hice.
Planned Parenthood received almost $700 million in government funding for the 2022-2023 fiscal year according to its most recent annual report. Planned Parenthood performed almost 400,000 abortions for that year, according to the most recent corresponding data.
It was in 2015 that Republicans first called for defunding of Planned Parenthood in a bill introduced by Republican Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Rand Paul of Kentucky. The bill failed.
Not all Planned Parenthood funding comes from the government. Some of it, according to a undercover video from David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress in 2015, came from the sale of late-term fetuses, some of which had been delivered alive and mostly intact.
Planned Parenthood said at the time that the taped conversations only showed their staffers discussing legal, not-for-profit donation of fetal tissue to research firms.
Kamala Harris, as California attorney general, began an investigation into Daleiden and his colleagues for privacy violations related to their undercover recordings.
Planned Parenthood has filed a lawsuit against Daleiden, who has a December court date and faces eight felony charges and possible jail time in California for making videos without consent from Planned Parenthood executives.
“Since 2015 we have known that Planned Parenthood is profiting off the sale of unborn babies’ body parts. That was exposed by David Daleiden, and we know Vice President Kamala Harris tried to shut down his attempts to bring this to light. She has gone after him because of him showing what Planned Parenthood does,” Szoch said.
She praises Vance’s comments and would like to see a Trump-Vance administration follow through on defunding Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood defunding? Go all the way
But Szoch fears that too much of Republicans’ attention is focused on Democrats’ demand for abortion with zero restrictions.
That means late-term abortions when a child could conceivably survive outside the womb with little or no assistance.
“Americans are not comfortable with the idea of a woman in months seven, eight and nine going to an abortion clinic and having the abortionist there end the life of her child at that point. When we talk about late-term abortion we bring that thought to peoples’ minds, and the hope there is they will eventually connect that the baby at month seven is the same exact baby in month five, in month three and right at the moment of fertilization,” she said.
Defunding Planned Parenthood has to come with no strings attached, Szoch said.
“I’m hopeful that means they’re committed to defunding Planned Parenthood completely.”
