There Is No More Middle Ground on Abortion

Trump thinks he can finesse the issue, but that's no longer possible.

Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash

Donald Trump’s supporters are fond of saying that he “tells it like it is” — not for him the careful positioning and calculated pandering of the politician, Trump gives it to you straight! That has never been true, but at some moments it becomes particularly obvious that he is in fact more likely to shift with the political wind than other politicians. So it has always been with abortion, an issue on which Trump has taken a variety of positions over the years, depending on whatever he thought people wanted to hear. 

This week, sporting a new skin tone that may be called “Burnished Walnut,” Trump released a video laying out his latest position on abortion:

The particulars of what Trump said are predictably disturbing, but what’s most striking is this: Trump was hoping that he could position himself on the middle ground, to maximize the number of voters who believe he agrees with them and minimize the number who will be alienated by his stance. But you can’t do that anymore. There is no more middle ground on abortion.

There used to be a middle ground, which is where the median voter supposedly was. Roughly speaking, that imagined voter didn’t want abortion to be banned, but found it kind of icky and wanted it to be restricted, maybe by making abortion illegal after the first trimester. And they wanted exceptions to bans for victims of rape and incest. 

So the idea was that if a politician adopted that position, they’d be mostly safe, offending the fewest number of people on both sides of the issue. And for many years, the story of public opinion on abortion was that public opinion on abortion never really changed. Despite all the vociferous arguments we have about the issue, around 10-20 percent of Americans thought abortion should always be illegal, 20-30 percent thought it should always be available, and the rest thought it should be available but with some restrictions:

When the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, it transformed the abortion issue from something that most people could think about in abstract terms to something that is playing out in their lives and in the media in very concrete ways every day. The result of that is a clarification of the issue that has made many of the arguments people used to use and the positions people used to take irrelevant. 

It’s not that you couldn’t find voters who take that middle position. But in practical political terms, there are only two paths to take on abortion, one toward securing rights and one toward undermining them. The “middle” position means more restrictions that ultimately lead to abortion being outlawed. And we all know it.

Dobbs changed everything

Just a few weeks ago, Trump floated that he might favor a national ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. “The number of weeks now, people are agreeing on 15, and I’m thinking in terms of that, and it’ll come out to something that’s very reasonable,” he said. But he has discarded that in favor of focusing on the idea that “the people” will decide whether abortion will be legal, and where.

In his video, Trump still owns the overturning of Roe (he laughably claims that “I was proudly the person responsible for ending something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade”). But his insistence that abortion should be decided state by state — which conservatives always argued as a way of claiming that overturning Roe was itself a moderate position that only sought to let the will of the people prevail — has lost whatever meaning it had. 

First, we’ve already seen the horrifying results of letting states decide for the tens of millions of women who live in red states. Second, it has become clear that Republicans have absolutely no intention of letting blue states decide to maintain abortion access. 

Not only do Republicans yearn to pass a national abortion ban through Congress, they have an alternate strategy as well, one that relies not on politicians operating on contested political ground but on a place they already control: The Supreme Court.  As historian Mary Ziegler has written, the destination the antiabortion movement is heading toward “is enshrining ‘fetal personhood’ as the law of the land, giving fetuses the same rights as all other persons under the 14th Amendment — an outcome that would have extraordinary consequences.” Including outlawing abortion everywhere. 

For whatever combination of reasons — including horror at the visible consequences of abortion bans and distrust of Republicans when they try to sound moderate — looking for the middle ground isn’t working. Virginia Republicans thought they had found it in last November’s elections in the state, settling on a 15-week ban as their position. Voters weren’t impressed, and Democrats won the state House to take total control of the legislature. Democrats have won election after election since Roe was overturned, no matter how Republicans have tried to position themselves.

There may also be a growing understanding that “exceptions” for rape and incest are meaningless, since they’re inevitably designed so that almost no one will be able to use them. And in most states where Republicans have banned abortion, they don’t even bother carving out exceptions. 

Hardline antiabortion Republicans have criticized Trump for failing to support a national ban, but there’s surely some playacting going on. They are hardly unaware of how unpopular their position is; in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, only 19 percent of respondents said they wanted a national law prohibiting abortion, compared to 55 percent who wanted a national law protecting it. If they can act outraged and contribute to the idea that Trump is now an abortion moderate — knowing full well that if he’s elected he’ll continue to stock the judiciary and every relevant government agency with committed foes of abortion rights — all the better for them. And no one doubts that if a future Republican Congress passed a national ban and Trump was president, he’d sign it. 

In short, this is no longer an issue any politician can finesse. Either you’re in favor of abortion rights or you aren’t. Which is why messaging like this ad from the Biden campaign is exactly the right approach to take:

Simple, powerful, and true: Dobbs has been a catastrophe, Donald Trump is why, and if he is elected again, abortion rights in America are only headed in one direction. There is no middle.