Trump, Truth and Abortion

THE NEWYORK TIMES

Maybe Donald Trump did everyone a favor with his famous jail-the-women comment. When he blurted out that “there has to be some form of punishment” for anyone who has an abortion, he blew the cover off the carefully constructed public face of the anti-choice movement.

Let’s take a look.

There’s no reason to imagine Trump ever gave a millisecond of thought to the details of abortion policy until he got trapped in that merciless interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. There are certain right-wing tropes that he just grabbed onto when he started his presidential run. One is that whenever the topic comes up, he’s supposed to announce he’s “pro-life.”

“I know,” Matthews followed up, adding, “But what should be the law?”

Trump babbled about totally unrelated topics, but Matthews, cruel man, pressed onward: “If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under law. Should abortion be punished?”

“Well, people in certain parts of the Republican Party and conservative Republicans would say yes, they should be punished,” the candidate replied.

Wow. Trump both passed the buck and smashed the anti-abortion movement’s most basic sales pitch: that their war is about protecting fully developed fetuses from being murdered in the womb. The fact that more than 90 percent of abortions happen in the first trimester, that shutting down Planned Parenthood clinics robs low-income women of health care and family planning services, is beside the point. You’re not supposed to admit that stopping abortions limits women’s choice, and heaven knows you don’t say you’re punishing them.

“You never blame the woman, you paint her as a victim.” said Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor and Trump supporter who was one of the very, very few anti-abortion public figures who didn’t cringe and demand that Trump walk back his comments. “That conservative orthodoxy has been born out of political expediency rather than logic.”

The rest of the religious right howled in denial. A woman who chooses to have an abortion is, apparently, not taking responsibility for herself. She’s … misled, poor thing.

“On the important issue of the sanctity of life, what’s far too often neglected is that being pro-life is not simply about the unborn child; it’s also about the mother — and creating a culture that respects her and embraces life,” said Ted Cruz. “Of course we shouldn’t be talking about punishing women; we should affirm their dignity and the incredible gift they have to bring life into the world.”

Remember, people, that Ted Cruz does not believe that a 12-year-old rape victim should be allowed to have an abortion. But that’s all part of affirming women’s dignity.

In reality, the anti-abortion movement is grounded on the idea that sex outside of marriage is a sin, and the only choice a woman should have is between abstinence and the possibility of imminent parenthood. It may be politically unwise to say that the sinner ought to pay, but she should at minimum have to carry an unwanted child to term.

Look at it this way and it’s easy to understand why abortion opponents have shown virtually no interest in working to make contraceptives and family planning universally available. It’s the sex, at bottom, that they oppose, and the politicians they support feel no pressure — or even any freedom — to try to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies through anything but high school abstinence lectures. Contraception may not be illegal, but it’s certainly not something you want to treat with respect.

(In honor of that last thought we will revisit the response Ted Cruz made to a question about family planning during the campaign: “Last I checked, we don’t have a rubber shortage in America. Look, when I was in college, we had a machine in the bathroom; you put 50 cents in and voilà. So, yes, anyone who wants contraceptives can access them, but it’s an utterly made-up nonsense issue.”)

Since Donald Trump has no real positions on almost anything except deals, you’d think he could have put his remarkable intellectual neutrality to some advantage on this issue. It would have been great if he’d told Matthews that he wanted to fight abortion by giving women easy, low-cost access to contraceptives.Instead, of course, he babbled and evaded, at one point demanding to know if Matthews was a Catholic. It was a little like the moment at the Washington Post editorial board interview when he was being pressed on whether he’d use tactical nuclear weapons against ISIS and responded: “I’ll tell you one thing. This is a very good looking group of people here. Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?”

There was, however, one moment of shining clarity. It came when he was asked whether the man who created an unwanted pregnancy should be punished, too.

“I would say no,” Trump quickly decreed.