How Trump Ran Over the Anti-Abortion Movement
On his way to the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump ran over the anti-choice movement. Never in the post-Reagan era has a Republican presidential candidate exhibiting such flippant disregard for the movement’s priorities even come close to becoming the party’s standard-bearer.
Trump voters have effectively sidelined one of the Republican Party’s most loyal and potent constituencies. In state after state, Trump voters do not appear to care about an issue that has driven religious conservatives to the polls and Republican presidents and legislators to cater to their demands.
The 2016 cycle was supposed to be the anti-choice movement’s moment. The Supreme Court, in its first major abortion case in decades, will decide whether a controversial Texas law that could close the vast majority of the state’s abortion clinics is constitutional. Even if Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia hadn’t died suddenly at the peak of the primary, conservatives were poised to make judicial nominations a core loyalty test for the GOP hopefuls. But instead of elevating these issues to the forefront, Trump voters showed just how much they have pushed them to the bottom of their laundry list.
Despite widespread opposition to Trump in the anti-choice movement, Trump is besting his rivals who deploy all the “right” language on abortion. In January, just before the Iowa caucuses, long-time leaders in the anti-choice movement wrote an open letter to voters, urging them to vote for “anyone but Trump.” The letter emphasized the goal of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and questioned Trump’s commitment to that cause. “On the issue of defending unborn children and protecting women from the violence of abortion,” the letter read, “Mr. Trump cannot be trusted.”
Since that letter was written a little over a month ago, Trump has won more states and consolidated more delegates than Ted Cruz, who has said “unborn babies” should have equal protection rights under the Constitution, and wants to make the campaign a “referendum on the Supreme Court.” He is crushing “little” Marco Rubio, who has said he opposes abortion without exceptions for rape or incest, and whose campaign assembled a “Dignity of Life Advisory Board” of noted abortion opponents. His director of faith outreach, Eric Teetsel, calls “the unjust termination of the unborn” the “social justice issue of our time.”