Donald Trump is downplaying his position on abortion

Donald Trump is attempting a tricky approach to abortion in the 2024 presidential race. As president, he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to abortion bans in red states. As a candidate, he would rather downplay the issue.

Trump's allies this summer backed a Republican Party platform that "abandons the party's long-standing explicit support for national restrictions," said The Washington Post. The platform does leave open a path for courts to "grant fetuses additional legal rights" — which would narrow any remaining abortion protections — but the "watered-down language" infuriated the GOP's influential anti-abortion wing, said the Post.

The former president has instead made the case that "abortion rights should be left to the states," said CNN. With the end of Roe, "my view is now that we have abortion where everyone wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation," Trump said in an April video on his Truth Social account. He has refused to endorse a national abortion ban — and his running mate, J.D. Vance, said in August that Trump would in fact veto such a ban. "I mean, if you're not supporting it, as the president of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it," Vance said to NBC News.

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The return of a 'zombie law'?

Trump doesn't necessarily need to pass a new ban to restrict abortion at the federal level. The Comstock Act is a "zombie law" that has stood "unenforced for decades," Meghan Bartels said at Scientific American. Still on the books, it forbids sending "instruments of contraception or abortion" through the mail. Comstock Act enforcement is a key feature of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint that Trump has repudiated. (He has also said he won't enforce the Comstock Act.) Abortion rights activists are still alarmed, though. If enforced, the act "would preempt state laws that protect abortion rights, and states that have ballot initiatives, and states that have other protective legislation," UC Davis' Mary Ziegler said to Mother Jones.

"Medication abortions" now account for most abortions in the United States. Trump in August suggested he is "open to curbing access to abortion pills through federal regulations," said The Washington Post. But Vance walked that back in a later appearance on CBS' "Face The Nation." "What the president has said very clearly is that abortion policy should be made by the states, right?" Vance said.

'Less pro-abortion than Kamala Harris'

Trump's positions have produced a backlash from some of his anti-abortion supporters. Live Action's Lila Rose told her audience that it is "impossible" for her to support Trump, said the BBC. "It's very clear that Trump is less pro-abortion than Kamala Harris," Rose said, but her group's goal is to back candidates "who are going to be fighters for the pre-born."

The abortion issue is Trump's "greatest dilemma," Anthea Butler said at MSNBC. The policies of his anti-abortion evangelical supporters "are not popular" — even red states like Kansas have voted against restrictions — but he "needs those white evangelical voters to stick by his side." That dilemma means we may not fully know Trump's future abortion policies until, or unless, voters put him back in the White House.