When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago and a half-century of abortion rights, Donald Trump said it would be bad for Republicans. He was obviously talking about himself, because last week he clumsily offered several different positions on abortion in an attempt to find his footing, baffling his supporters.
This radical decision by the Supreme Court is the result of the work of three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices who now find themselves two months away from Election Day.
In an interview with NBC News On Thursday, he said a second Trump administration would directly provide or force insurers to provide in vitro fertilization treatments to anyone who needs them.
So will the federal government provide or mandate coverage for IVF treatments and then keep the resulting tens or hundreds of thousands of embryos frozen? For how long, indefinitely? And who exactly will allocate the enormous resources that will be required?
Congress would probably not be very enthusiastic, and it is doubtful that Trump could reasonably pull off another fiscal sleight of hand like he did by allocating military funds to build a border wall. Knowledgeable experts on the subject have already said: It is a difficult logistical task accomplish.
This is likely a diversion aimed at diverting attention from the issue of abortion access, where Trump is firmly underwater with an electorate that, despite all the careful and prolonged campaigns of disinformation and restriction by the conservative legal and social movement, remains supportive of abortion care.
Trump wants to use the somewhat related issue of IVF as an argument to say he is not out of touch with public preferences, a strategy that has continued from his time as president. he publicly decried The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision after Roe to treat frozen embryos as human beings. We doubt it will actually work.
On abortion, Trump, who now lives and votes in Florida, said that the state’s six-week abortion ban was too short, leading to speculation that he might vote yes on the Sunshine State ballot question to overturn the six-week ban by enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution. But when that upset his pro-life supporters, he reversed his mind Friday and said he would vote against the constitutional amendment. He has gotten himself into a lot of trouble on that issue.
Trump was right in his prediction two years ago about Republicans’ troubles, but he is the one most responsible, having handpicked three Supreme Court justices specifically to kill Roe. Abortion bans, like Florida’s, state constitutional amendments—which have passed everywhere they’ve been voted on—and his new guaranteed IVF treatments for all, all stem from the fall of Roe.
The Supreme Court was wrong to overturn a long-standing precedent, but in his Dobbs opinion, Justice Sam Alito said the abortion issue would be decided by the states. But what is happening is that the pro-choice majorities in the states are now wielding their power unleashed. Trump sees this, and that is why he is doing this back-and-forth dance. We will soon find out if the public buys into his choreography.
