On Friday, Donald Trump declared that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” The Truth Social post immediately drew the ire of anti-abortion leaders and the mockery of commentators supportive of abortion rights, who noted that in an interview the day before, Trump had also repeated his now familiar (and false) line that all Americans wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. Trump is trying to have it both ways. And while this strategy may not exactly be working at the moment, history can help us understand his bigger goal — and whether it will work in the longer term.
Clearly, Trump and many in the GOP are aware that the reversal of Roe remains unpopular. And Republicans’ attempts to appear more moderate may seem novel, given how recently politicians like JD Vance boasted about their pro-life bona fides. But in reality, just a few decades ago mainstream Republicans were already trying hard to appease both sides of the debate.
Republicans’ attempts to appear more moderate may seem novel, given how recently politicians like JD Vance boasted about their pro-life bona fides.
Ronald Reagan was the first GOP presidential nominee to fully embrace the anti-abortion movement, believing not that most Americans opposed legal abortion but that his position could help the GOP win over socially conservative Catholics and Democrats who might have voted Democratic for economic reasons. In 1976, the GOP platform adopted at the Republican National Convention had taken a muddy position on abortion; in 1980, Reagan ran on a platform that embraced an amendment to the Constitution to protect fetal rights.
But by the late 1980s and early 1990s, GOP leaders were having second thoughts. Lee Atwater, George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager, often stated publicly that anti-abortion positions were unpopular and stressed that the GOP was a “big tent” that could accommodate those with a range of positions on reproductive rights.
With Atwater’s encouragement, Ann Stone, the ex-wife of Trumpworld insider Roger Stone, launched Republicans for Choice in 1990 to organize these efforts. This move was blunted by the success of firebrand Pat Buchanan during the 1992 GOP primary, however. Buchanan fared better than expected in several key contests, winning himself a prime slot at the GOP national convention, where he railed against abortion and women working outside the home. Republicans had considered changing their platform at the 1992 Republican National Convention to leave out demands for a fetal personhood amendment. But Bush ultimately veered back to the right on the issue.
The whiplash continued. After autopsies of the race established that the abortion issue had hurt George H.W. Bush, the effort to make the GOP a “big tent” regained momentum. Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader and GOP standard bearer in 1996, wanted to push a more moderate line. He called on his party to condemn a specific procedure performed in the second trimester that abortion opponents called “partial-birth abortion.” At the same time, Dole promoted a pledge of tolerance welcoming those into the GOP with a wide variety of views on personhood, especially those who considered themselves pro-choice. But Dole lost that November to President Bill Clinton, and abortion opponents argued that his position on abortion had watered down the enthusiasm of his own base.
President George W. Bush won two elections at a time when abortion rights seemed secure. His father, by contrast, lost an election at precisely the time many Americans had first expected Roe to be overturned. By that point, Reagan and the elder Bush — both of whom had called for the reversal of Roe — had nominated a majority of the justices then on the Supreme Court. And more tellingly, in 1989, the Supreme Court had issued a major decision openly criticizing Roe.
This election season, Trump has borrowed from strategies that the GOP once used to undercut Democrats’ advantage on abortion. Like his predecessors, Trump and other Republicans have spotlighted abortions later in pregnancy, presuming them to be more unpopular. The 2024 GOP platform omitted any mention of a fetal-personhood constitutional amendment and praised IVF. And as mentioned earlier, Trump himself has used the language of “reproductive rights,” suggesting that he, too, wants to build a big tent.
But look closer, and it is clear that Trump is doing something different. Advocates like Atwater or Stone might generally have supported some abortion rights — or felt the need to change the GOP’s position to remain electorally relevant. (Welcoming pro-abortion voters into the tent, in theory, would necessitate a political pivot.) With Trump, it’s far less clear that this is the case. After all, Trump never defined what he meant by “reproductive rights,” and has claimed baselessly that Americans never wanted a right to abortion in the first place. This despite polls dating back to before Roe’s reversal show that more than half of Americans did not want it to be reversed. It certainly seems possible that Trump’s definition of reproductive rights could actually exclude the right to an abortion. This confusion is par for the course with Trump. His platform, for example, nodded to the theory that the Fourteenth Amendment already recognized fetal personhood, and members of the platform committee insisted that it was for this reason that there was no longer a need to mention a specific personhood amendment. Trump has said that he supports the Supreme Court’s recent ruling preserving access to the abortion pill mifepristone yet also suggested that he was open to prohibiting mifepristone access. And recently, when stating that he would not enforce the Comstock Act, a nineteenth-century obscenity law some conservatives would love used to ban abortion, Trump made clear that the specifics had yet to be worked out, and that his commitment not to enforce the law, such as it was, applied only “generally.” The upshot, it seems, is that Trump wants both anti-abortion voters and supporters of abortion rights to vote for him without offering either one much of anything. Trump’s obfuscation has angered anti-abortion leaders with reason — it suggests that he has taken their voters for granted. And Trump has embraced talk of reproductive rights while reiterating how happy he is that the Supreme Court overturned the biggest safeguard to those rights. Trump is not the first Republican to try to walk a fine line on abortion. But he may be the first GOP presidential candidate to try to totally redefine the concept of reproductive rights in a bid to soften his rhetoric without having to actually soften any of his policy stances.
Mary Ziegler is a law professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law and the author of "Roe: The History of a National Obsession." 
