When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and a half-century of settled abortion rights two years ago, Donald Trump said it would be bad for Republicans. He obviously meant himself, as last week he clumsily offered a few different stands on abortion as he tries to find his footing, confounding his supporters.
The radical court decision was the result of three justices Trump put on the court and now he’s scrambling two months before Election Day.
During an interview with NBC News on Thursday he said a second Trump administration would either directly provide or force insurers to provide in-vitro fertilization treatments for anyone who needed them.
So what then, the federal government is going to provide or mandate coverage for IVF treatments, and then keep the resulting tens or hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos? For how long, indefinitely? And who exactly is going to allocate the enormous resources that are going to be necessary?
Congress likely wouldn’t be all too keen, and it’s dubious that Trump could reasonably pull off another fiscal sleight of hand like he did appropriating military funds towards a border wall. Experts actually well-versed in the matter have already said it’s a logistically tall order to accomplish.
More likely, this is meant as a misdirection away from the issue of abortion access, where Trump is decisively underwater with an electorate that, for all of the conservative legal and social movement’s careful and decades-long campaign of misinformation and restriction, remains in support of abortion care.
Trump wants to use the somewhat related issue of IVF as a cudgel to say that he’s not out of touch with public preferences, a strategy continued from when he publicly decried the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision post-Roe to consider frozen embryos people. We doubt that’s really going to work.
On abortion directly, Trump, now a Florida resident and voter, said that the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks is too short a time, making people think that he might vote yes on the Sunshine State’s ballot question to overturn the six-week ban by enshrining abortion rights in the state Constitution. But when that upset his pro-life backers, he shifted again on Friday and said that he was going to vote against the constitutional amendment. He’s tangled himself up a lot on this one.
Trump was correct in his prediction two years ago about problems for Republicans, but he is the person most responsible, picking three Supreme Court justices especially for the purpose of killing Roe. The abortion bans, like Florida’s; the state constitutional amendments — which have passed everywhere they’ve been on the ballot — and his new guaranteed IVF treatments for everyone, all come from the fall of Roe.
The high court was wrong to reverse a longstanding precedent, but in his Dobbs opinion, Justice Sam Alito said that the matter of abortion would be decided by the states. And what is happening is that the pro-choice majorities in the states are now exercising their unleashed power. Trump sees that and it’s the reason he’s engaged in his back and forth dance. We will find out soon if the public is buying his choreography.