Do Republicans Finally Have a Consensus Opinion on Abortion?

The grim reality for the Republican Party is that abortion access is an issue that has galvanized voters over and over, even in red states like Kansas and Kentucky. The party has yet to coalesce around a position, but behind doors, Donald Trump has reportedly expressed support for a 16-week ban on abortion with exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother, according to The New York Times. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s embrace of such a ban is rooted in neither science nor principle. According to an anonymous source in the Times report, his reasoning is, “It’s even. It’s four months.”

Trump and Nikki Haley, the last two candidates standing in the Republican presidential primary, have assiduously avoided publicly taking a clear-cut stance on what level of a ban they would back in an apparent attempt to maintain the support of the religious right while not ostracizing voters without hard-line views on abortion, Republican women being a notable cohort.

Haley, trailing in distant second place in the Republican primary, has seemingly staked out a position of avoiding the topic altogether. “We are not going to demonize this issue anymore. We are not going to play politics with this issue anymore. We’re going to treat it like the respectful issue that it is,” she said during a Republican debate. But, in an interview last month with CBS’s Face the Nation, the former South Carolina governor did say she is “fine with a federal law [banning abortion].”

A Trump spokesperson issued a statement in response to the Times article, which said Trump “would sit down with both sides and negotiate a deal that everyone will be happy with.” But a 16-week federal ban clearly contradicts his actions in his first term when he, according to his own spokesperson, appointed conservative “federal judges and Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the decision back to the states, which others have tried to do for over 50 years.”

That neither of the two Republican candidates for president has taken a strong public stance on abortion exposes just how thorny an issue abortion has proven to be for the Republican Party. Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, characterized the party’s political conundrum to Vanity Fair as something of a “dog who caught the car” scenario. Indeed, for nearly 50 years, conservatives were united in the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade without really plotting what would happen if federal protections for abortion were actually gutted. “Now we’re figuring it out,” Brown said. “There’s always going to be some element of just, ‘Where is the bell curve of public opinion, where is the sweet spot?’ but then at the same time, the political realities meet up with the deep-held belief that every week, every marker of fetal development that you can push the protections forward is actually saving a life… There are a lot of people who feel like compromise is selling out.”

If there were to be a “consensus” position on abortion within GOP ranks, an argument could increasingly be made that it is in the 15 to 16-week range. Quite notably, one of the country’s leading antiabortion groups, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, adopted 15 weeks as its official position. “We recognize that after 50 years of Roe, it will take time to build a culture of life in the United States,” Mary Owens, a spokesperson for the group, wrote in a statement to VF. Senator Lindsey Graham staked out this position shortly after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization with the introduction of legislation that would ban abortions at the federal level at 15 weeks. Ahead of the 2023 fall election cycle, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin drew the same line in the sand. (But state Republicans fell short in that election, and Democrats maintained control of Virginia’s state Senate and flipped the House of Delegates.) Before he dropped out of the Republican presidential primary, Senator Tim Scott also backed a 15-week federal abortion ban.

Proponents of a 15-week ban often use an unfounded claim that it is the stage in pregnancy at which a fetus can feel pain, but, from a medical perspective, “that’s just not accurate,” says Dr. Nisha Verma, a board-certified OB-GYN and complex family planning specialist based in Georgia. “They don’t have the brain circuits in place yet to feel pain [at 15 weeks],” Verma told VF. “It’s not consistent with the medical data.” She added, “There are many medical conditions in pregnancy that put people’s health at risk that don’t develop until after 15 weeks. There are a lot of chronic medical conditions people have that worsen after 15 weeks, and then there’s a lot of fetal anomalies that you just can’t diagnose before 15 weeks, including particularly lethal fetal anomalies.” From a medical perspective, Verma argued, the 15-week benchmark “is pulled out of thin air.” As the GOP scrambles to coalesce around a politically palatable position on abortion, Verma says no position can encompass the circumstances of all patients. “A 15-week ban, a six-week ban, none of this legislation can take all of those individual situations into account, and they just cause harm and prevent people from getting the care that they need.”