Politics
Harris threatens to upend every piece of progress the cause of life has made in the past 20 years.
When Rudy Giuliani ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, he had already flip-flopped on abortion once. Having switched from pro-life to pro-choice in his first New York City mayoral campaign, he didn’t think he could plausibly change back for the Republican presidential primaries.
Still basking in the glow of being “America’s Mayor” on 9/11, Giuliani sought the presidential nomination of a pro-life party as a pro-choice candidate. But he did make a few modifications to his position: He defended the partial-birth abortion ban, which he had opposed during his short-lived 2000 Senate campaign in New York, backed parental-notification laws, and vowed to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court who might someday vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Giuliani sat atop the national polls for most of 2007, making him the Republican frontrunner. But his pro-choice position ultimately proved fatal, as it informed his disastrous political strategy of skipping the early states. Iowa and South Carolina were too socially conservative for a New York abortion rights advocate. New Hampshire might have more fertile ground, but he feared losing to Mitt Romney, then of neighboring Massachusetts.
Romney switched from pro-choice to pro-life and was rewarded with the Republican presidential nomination four years later. (He would later have to switch states from Massachusetts to Utah to continue his political career, but that’s another story.) So did Donald Trump four years after that.
Unlike Romney, Trump was elected president. And unlike Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, the judges Trump appointed did overturn Roe v. Wade. If both Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas had been confirmed, it might have happened 30 years earlier—but it didn’t.
All this history comes in the context of the first post-Roe presidential race. Trump is panicking about abortion. And pro-lifers are panicking about Trump.
Trump has gone too far in using phrases like “reproductive rights” to describe abortion (though he might have meant IVF, which is different, though it raises its own set of pro-life ethical issues). He excessively diluted the pro-life plank of the Republican platform, making it the weakest it has been since 1976. He still takes credit for Roe’s reversal, but is clearly rattled by recent Republican electoral setbacks on abortion, especially now that he is running a more competitive race against a female opponent.
Much as was the case when Trump’s pal Rudy was the GOP frontrunner all those years ago, Republicans who don’t care much about abortion are telling pro-lifers to shut up and fall in line if they want to win.
While I have defended Trump for not wanting to rush headlong into where the pro-choice position is strongest,