The revisions radiate fear without doing anything to address the basis for it.
The revisions radiate fear without doing anything to address the basis for it.
N ikki Haley had the right idea about how Republicans should handle abortion policy. I did not agree with everything she said about the issue, but she was right to frame it in terms of building a consensus in favor of life.
A Republican platform that took that approach to heart could have said something like this: “We aspire to live in an America where every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. Now that the Supreme Court has rightly returned this issue to the legislative process, we recognize that states will reach different conclusions about abortion while hoping that all will find ways to protect unborn children and support families in need. We urge public officials in all states to make it clear that doctors may take action to protect pregnant women from grave risks of serious physical injury, even if the danger is not imminent and even if that action ends the child’s life. While Americans engage in a peaceful and democratic debate over this issue, we urge Congress to set a national baseline of prohibiting abortions late in pregnancy, to reaffirm that taxpayer dollars shall not be used for abortion, and to provide meaningful conscience protections for health-care providers who do not wish to perform abortions.”
Such language would have affirmed pro-life ambitions while also acknowledging political realities that limit them. The new Republican platform language that Donald Trump and his advisers have devised reflects some of the same imperatives: It tries to mollify Americans who favor legal abortion without making concessions that are intolerable to pro-lifers. But I do not think that the new language succeeds in this goal.
The concessions are, I think, tolerable (which is doubtless why pro-life organizations that don’t want a fight with Trump have given their blessing to the new platform). The platform says Republicans will advance “access to contraception” and also advance in vitro fertilization. I would prefer something more specific, such as, “Republicans believe that contraception and IVF should be legal, and insinuations to the contrary are politically motivated lies.” The new platform does not, however, strictly preclude major improvements in government policy such as restrictions on IVF practices that kill human embryos.
The platform had long called for federal legislation against abortion. The new one does not, but does not express opposition to such legislation, either. It says “we will oppose Late Term Abortion” but does not say whether that opposition entails federal or state legislation against it. So a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks seems compatible with the platform, even if it remains a heavy and, in the near term, unlikely political lift.
As the preceding discussion suggests, the new language is vaguer and more ambiguous than what came before it. Pinning down what it means is not aided by its logical and descriptive errors in this passage: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States 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. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People.”
Some problems here.
1) The Court restored legislative authority in general rather than specifically giving it to the states.
2) The 14th Amendment does not give the states the power to prohibit abortion: They had that power and were exercising it to varying extents before the amendment’s ratification.
3) If the amendment guarantees that unborn children have a right to life, states are not just “free” but obligated to defend that right.
4) If the amendment guarantees that unborn children have a right to life, its fifth section seems to suggest that Congress should step in — which is the view that this platform is most concerned with scurrying away from.
5) The due-process clause of the amendment has little to do with it. It would be relevant in cases where state governments themselves directly take unborn lives (or perhaps pay for it). When those governments are allowing abortions generally, it’s the equal-protection clause that matters: Governments are obligated to protect unborn children from homicide, just as they protect other categories of persons.
The hedging of the concessions, along with the ambiguities and confusions in the text, undermines any political advantage the drafters were seeking. Democrats will continue to say that the Republican platform calls for a national ban on abortion — and they’ll have some warrant for doing so, particularly since they have long gotten away with saying that a national ban on abortion late in pregnancy counts as one.
Defenders of the new platform are already out explaining that the details of platforms don’t really matter. But then why insist on the new ones?
The overall impression given by the platform is that Republicans want to keep pro-lifers happy but are desperately afraid of the political costs. Those costs, it still seems to me, are real but grossly exaggerated. (I’ll keep saying it since nobody else will: No pro-life senator or governor has lost reelection since the Supreme Court overturned Roe.) The chief problem with the revisions to the platform is that they radiate fear without doing anything to address the basis for it.