WASHINGTON — Former President Trump is still struggling to find an abortion answer that will satisfy both moderate voters and his party’s anti-abortion contingent, and Vice President Harris pressed him on it during Tuesday night’s debate.
According to Trump, the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was popular across the country. But Trump also doesn’t want to be associated with many Republicans’ long-standing plans for a national ban, reflecting the political quagmire the issue has become for the GOP.
“I’m not signing a ban, and there’s no reason to sign a ban, because we got what everyone wanted,” Trump told Harris during his first debate. The Democratic nominee hammered him on his changing position while highlighting anti-abortion proposals from conservative groups — leading Trump to once again sow distance between himself and a group of former officials.
The Republican candidate stumbled as she fended off her attacks. He mischaracterized the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, saying it was arrived at by “the genius, heart, and strength of six Supreme Court Justices” (there were five; Chief Justice John Roberts disagreed). Trump also distanced himself from his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, when asked about Vance’s comments that Trump would veto a national abortion banand said he “didn’t discuss it with JD.”
Trump insisted, as he did in the previous debate and in numerous campaign stops, that “every legal scholar” wanted national protections against abortion to return to the states. But while the Republican Party-led Legislature has approved restrictions, voters have not. Most oppose national bans and believe the Supreme Court made the wrong decisionnational opinion polls show.
Harris appealed to voters to empathize with people seeking abortions in traumatic circumstances or to protect their health. While Trump has said he supports allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest and threats to life, some state bans do not include these exceptions and practitioners who make decisions at this time could face penalties.
“Understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation of his body, has no right to make a decision about what happens next to his body,” Harris said. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, who suffer from a miscarriage, who are denied emergency room care because health care providers are afraid they might end up in jail.”
In the months after the 2022 decision overturning Roe, five states voted on ballot measures that codified abortion rights or rejected restrictions. Ohio last year voted to protect abortion rights and Virginians surrendered legislative control to Democrats, effectively ending their Republican governor’s plans to impose state restrictions.
Ten more states will vote on abortion protection in the November elections. That includes Trump’s home state of Florida, where voters will decide language protecting abortion up to viability, which would reverse a current ban on the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.
The former president has previously said publicly that a six-week ban is too restrictive.
But in recent days, Trump said he would vote against expanding abortion protections in Florida.
Harris, amid comments decrying the former president’s changing stance, nodded to the moderate voters Democrats hope to reach on the issue.
“You don’t have to give up your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree [that] the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said.