When Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2016, the leaders of the anti-abortion motion extracted a sequence of guarantees from him in alternate for backing his nomination.
They demanded Supreme Court docket justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. They insisted that he defund Deliberate Parenthood. They pushed for a vice chairman who was a champion of their trigger. And every time, he stated sure.
However that was then.
With Roe v. Wade left on the “ash heap of historical past,” as anti-abortion leaders are fond of claiming, they discover themselves not calling the photographs. Their motion stays mighty in Republican-controlled statehouses and with conservative courts, however it’s weaker nationally than it has been in years. Many Republican strategists and candidates see their trigger, even the decades-old time period “pro-life,” as politically poisonous. And on Monday, their greatest champion, the person whom they name the “most pro-life president in historical past,” selected politics over their rules — and launched a sequence of vitriolic assaults on a few of their prime leaders.
Together with his clearest assertion but on the way forward for abortion rights for the reason that fall of Roe in 2022, Mr. Trump laid naked how defective a messenger he had all the time been for the anti-abortion trigger. When he first flirted with a presidential run in 1999, Mr. Trump was clear about his place on abortion: “I’m very pro-choice,” he stated. He reversed that stance a dozen years later: “Simply very briefly, I’m pro-life,” he instructed attendees on the Conservative Political Motion Convention in 2011.
His help shifted once more after the Supreme Court docket’s resolution. Whereas he bragged about appointing three of the justices who overturned Roe, he blamed the motion for Republican losses within the midterm elections. He mused aloud concerning the thought of a federal ban, however refused to present it the form of ringing endorsement anti-abortion leaders wished.
In his four-minute video assertion on Monday, Mr. Trump stated that states and their voters ought to resolve abortion insurance policies for themselves, in language that appeared like a free-for-all to the staunchest abortion opponents. He backed entry to fertility remedies akin to I.V.F., and supported exceptions to abortion bans in circumstances of rape, incest and the lifetime of the mom.
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