“Deadly”: Experts warn Trump and Vance are “backpedaling” on abortion to conceal a darker reality

During Tuesday night's vice presidential debate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance conceded that Republicans need to do a better job of regaining Americans' trust on the issue of abortion, delivering a more moderate response to the question of restrictions than the far-right position he previously espoused. But experts warn that abortion rights would still be at risk if former President Donald Trump regains power.

Responding to Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's claim that he and Trump will adopt Project 2025's proposed abortion surveillance policies, Vance recalled growing up in a working-class community where he knew “a lot of young women who decided to terminate those pregnancies.” He spoke of an unnamed friend who he said had aborted a pregnancy from an abusive relationship, how she told him keeping the pregnancy would have "destroyed her life" and how the exchange impacted his perspective.

“I think that what I take from that as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable, is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they, frankly, just don’t trust us,” Vance said. “That’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do. I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.” 

Steven Greene, a professor of political science at North Carolina State University who researches abortion policy and public opinion, told Salon that while Vance's critique of the Republican Party is true, it's also reflective of Trump's determining that advocating for states to set their policies is "the most palatable, the most politically effective" position.

"Donald Trump has recognized that, certainly, the Republican position of a national abortion ban is completely toxic," Greene said in an interview. In settling on allowing states to determine their own abortion policies, Trump is "trying to walk a fine line. He does not want to get the pro-lifers too mad at him and frustrated and saying, 'Why is Donald Trump abandoning us?' And he also doesn't want to actually take their full positions of a national abortion ban."

Vance's Tuesday night criticism of the Republican Party marked a notable departure from his running mate's comments, which have repeatedly characterized the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe. v. Wade and eliminate federal protection for abortion as something Americans had wanted. The junior senator's remarks came as he sparred with Democratic vice presidential nominee Walz over abortion restrictions and reproductive care and defended Trump's state-level abortion policy stance as better reflecting the country's "diverse" viewpoints. 

“California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona. And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy,” he said. 

Experts say, however, that leaving decisions on abortion care up to the states isn't as enfranchising a proposition as it sounds. 

Chloe Thurston, a Northwestern University political science professor who has written on abortion policy, told Salon that Americans' far-reaching but overwhelmingly supportive preferences on abortion policy aren't always reflected in their state's laws.

The lower visibility and salience of state-level elections give voters with stricter preferences on abortion policy a leg up in deciding policy because voters who don't pay as much attention skip out on the polls, she explained. Baked-in barriers to advancing ballot referendum and legislative hurdles like gerrymandering, which can create an elected majority that opposes abortion regulations despite constituents' wishes, also play a role in boosting the discrepancy between voters' desires and the policies their state legislators implement. 

While kicking the decision back to the states can read as a "nice, democratic and innocent idea," and boosts Trump and Vance's claims of federal incompetence, the consequences of doing so have also proven "deadly," added Wendy Hansen, a University of New Mexico professor of political science whose research has explored abortion policy. 

In August, Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who suffered a rare complication from abortion pills, died from an infection after Georgia passed a law banning the abortion treatment that would have saved her life. Earlier this summer, Texas woman Kate Cox, whose fetus' lethal anomaly doctors said threatened her health and future fertility, left the state to obtain an abortion after the state Supreme Court denied her request for a restraining order on its near-total abortion ban. Lawyers said her condition was deteriorating as she awaited a determination on whether she could obtain abortion care. 

The overturn of Roe v. Wade made these women's harrowing realities possible and Trump and Vance's proposed state-varied abortion policy could beget more of them, Hansen suggested. 

"Instead of saying that they supported, and in Trump's case orchestrated, the overturn of Roe, Trump and Vance are backpedaling by now emphasizing that all they want to do is to give the power back to the states for the states' voters to decide," she said in an email, adding that: In effect, they're "both working to keep voters that they have alienated by supporting bans on abortions."

Allowing states to decide is "concealing what could end up being pretty coercive in different places and also deeply unpopular," added Thurston. "So it doesn't really, again, solve that problem they're talking about winning back trust because what you end up with are 50 different standards that don't necessarily reflect public opinion."

Taken against Vance's previous opinion on abortion policy — saying on a podcast while campaigning for the Senate in 2022 that he "certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” — his responses on the debate stage Tuesday read as "evasive," Thurston said.

Vance disputed having supported a national abortion ban when questioned on his previous stance during Tuesday's debate, claiming to have instead pushed for minimum national standards on abortion policy, citing the nation's ban on partial-birth abortions as an example. 

But Thurston said those policies, while sounding more palatable, could also leave the door open for greater restrictions while stepping on some of the state autonomy to make decisions around abortion that the Trump platform is pushing for. 

"You're not necessarily letting states choose, but you're also able to adopt that language of sounding moderate and flexible," she said. "It doesn't necessarily mean that those policies have to go in a moderate and flexible direction. They could also be used to make abortion less accessible."

For his part, Vance told CBS moderators Tuesday that Ohio voters overwhelmingly choosing to codify a right to an abortion up through the fetus' viability (between 22-24 weeks) into its Constitution last fall, in part, motivated his change in position on a national ban. He reiterated his and Trump's commitment to pro-family policies like making childcare and fertility treatments more accessible.

Vance also later accused Democrats of taking a "very radical pro-abortion stance" and claimed that Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris would force medical providers who opposed abortions to "violate their freedom of conscience" and provide them.

"We can be a big and diverse country where we respect people's freedom of conscience and make the country more pro-baby and pro-family," Vance said, reiterating his states-decide position.

But Greene argued that varied abortion policies, many of which have shown to be restrictive following the fall of Roe, violate the freedom of conscience of people who think it's appropriate for them to obtain an abortion but live in the "wrong state" and cannot.

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Using the example of a person seeking an abortion for a placental detachment at 18-weeks, Greene argued Republicans in heavily restrictive states often write their abortion bans in ways that aren't as thoughtful or careful as they should be. 

"From my perspective, you want to make sure every single person having a placental detachment at 18 weeks gets an abortion so they don't die," Greene said. "To make a policy that allows for that means there's going to be some people who are having what we would call an elective abortion at 18 weeks, that, shall we say, sneak through the cracks.

"The Republicans are so committed to this idea that nobody's going to cheat the system, that no unworthy person is going to get their 18-week abortion — they would never admit it to themselves — [that] the reality is that they are willing to roll the dice with the lives of these women who are suffering complications in pregnancy."

Weighing in during Tuesday night's debate, the former president took to Truth Social to declare his commitment to vetoing a federal abortion ban should it reach his desk in a potential second presidency. His proclamation came after he refused to make such a commitment during his debate with Harris last month.

“Everyone knows I would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it, because it is up to the states to decide based on the will of their voters (The will of the people!),” Trump wrote.

Prior to standing firmly behind a states-decide position, Trump had been notoriously wishy-washy in his stance on abortion policy. His presidential record, however, reflected a staunchly pro-life position. He made good on his 2016 campaign promise to confirm justices to the Supreme Court he felt would work to topple Roe v. Wade and claimed credit when the court did so 6-3 in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. He also prioritized defunding Planned Parenthood clinics, which offer abortion care, and unsuccessfully tried to undermine the Affordable Care Act's coverage for contraceptives. 

Given his record and both Trump and Vance's previous perspectives on abortion, Hansen and Greene said American voters can't necessarily trust Trump wouldn't sign a national ban or restriction. Hansen noted, however, that she didn't believe that would ever come to pass. 

"Let's just say the House and Senate pass a national abortion ban. Does Donald Trump truly veto that? That seems a stretch," Greene said. "People have every reason to be skeptical of just how honest Trump and Vance are being with them about where they would take abortion policy."