We’re just five months out from the presidential election, and Donald Trump is still either unable or unwilling — possibly both — to present voters with anything close to a coherent policy position on abortion and contraception. A refusal to provide coherent stances on two of the most consequential issues facing Americans today would be laughably preposterous coming from a third-party crackpot candidate; it ought to be fundamentally disqualifying for a former president. And yet here we are, with Trump preparing to face off against President Joe Biden on Thursday night for the first presidential debate of the year.
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Whether or not voters get a lucid statement on reproductive rights from Trump this week — I’m not optimistic — it’s appalling that Trump’s cowardice on this front hasn’t defined the coverage of his third bid for the White House. Instead, the mainstream and legacy political media has largely opted to treat whatever amounts to Trump’s latest statement on the issue as gospel until he changes his tune, which he inevitably does. Thursday’s debate moderators — Jake Tapper and Dana Bash of CNN — have an opportunity to change that by pressing Trump to take a position and pressing him to actually commit to it, whatever it is.
For decades, Trump has careened wildly between totally incompatible positions on abortion and contraception.
It’s a challenge Trump is unlikely to meet. For decades, Trump has careened wildly between totally incompatible positions on abortion and contraception. For much of his career before running for president, he claimed to be “pro-choice.” Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, he has alternated between proudly taking credit for the end of federal protections for abortion rights and eschewing responsibility by pretending a new Trump administration would simply leave the issue to the states.
But just weeks ago, Trump told the rabidly anti-abortion Danbury Institute, which supports prosecuting abortion as homicide, that it would “make a comeback” during his second term. Back in April, he told Time magazine he would share his policy on the abortion medication mifepristone “probably over the next week.” Two months later, there has been only silence. And he’s pulling the same kinds of stunts on contraception: In May, Trump turned a complete 180 on the contraception question in just a few hours, first telling a Pittsburgh news station that he was open to restrictions on birth control before posting an all-caps backtrack on his personal propaganda platform, Truth Social.
That Trump is allowed to do this while enjoying credulous coverage from a Beltway media hell-bent on normalizing the man’s wholesale inadequacy for office is an incredible disservice to the American electorate. Again and again, Trump has promised to provide us with concrete positions on reproductive issues and never delivered, only to be cast as a crafty messenger by journalists who seem unable to print the obvious: Donald Trump will say whatever he thinks he needs to say to get elected.
Trump’s latest feint — that abortion should be left up to individual states — certainly isn’t borne out by his party’s own actions, yet it’s repeated again and again in the media as if it’s incontrovertible truth. Hardly. Across the country, Republicans are using every tool at their disposal to block state ballot initiatives on abortion. GOP politicians have been open about these efforts at every turn, pledging to overrule, overturn or block voters’ will on abortion rights by any means necessary. This media failure is especially galling when these efforts actually tell a very consistent story about the Republican Party’s commitment to outlawing abortion, expanding abortion restrictions, and restricting access to birth control.
In the two years since Roe fell, Republicans have continued to terrorize pregnant people and their families by expanding abortion bans and proposing and even implementing restrictions on abortion access. Republicans in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama and South Carolina tried to pass legislation that would enable prosecutors to charge people who have abortions with murder. Here in Texas, the state bar fined a district attorney after he charged a Rio Grande Valley woman with homicide after a medical provider alleged that she had had a self-managed abortion, and Texas Republicans have even met with an anti-abortion group that supports the death penalty for abortion.
No matter what Trump says about abortion between now and November, his legacy of suffering and misery speaks for itself.
Republicans nationwide have repeatedly balked at adding “exceptions” to abortion bans for survivors of rape and incest, and they have ramped up bans on abortion access for young people. Anti-abortion attorneys general are fighting to deny emergency abortion care to people with life-threatening pregnancies, and three states could still revive challenges to Food and Drug Administration approval for medication abortion. And the GOP’s anti-abortion allies are doxxing abortion rights supporters in an attempt to scare and intimidate average folks away from engaging in pro-abortion advocacy.
Already, the GOP is readying to barrel ahead with further restrictions on reproductive rights if Trump returns to the White House. In just the last few weeks, congressional Republicans have blocked both the Right to Contraception Act and the Right to IVF Act. The Heritage Foundation has Project 2025’s anti-abortion, anti-contraception road map ready to roll if Trump returns to Washington, where he could extra-legislatively outlaw most abortions nationwide using the Comstock Act.
In light of all of this, one wonders whether what Trump says about abortion and contraception matters at all. His incomprehensible statements are divorced entirely from the real world, where Republicans are doing all they can at both the state and federal levels to prevent people from making their own decisions about when, whether and how to become or remain pregnant. But Trump isn’t some hapless stooge making a Hail Mary pass for the presidency; he’s a billionaire-backed former president hoping to regain office. He can’t go even one measly news cycle with a consistent message on reproductive rights, while his party is working every possible angle to legislate forced pregnancy and dictate compulsory birth at all costs. We are seeing the devastating effects of abortion bans in our own lives, every day, across the country. So it’s incumbent on the debate’s moderators — and any journalist interviewing Trump in the coming months — not just to ask him about abortion and contraception, but also to follow up, again and again, and refuse to let him spin his way out with non-answers. If we take Trump at his word that he’s proud of his hand-picked Supreme Court’s returning abortion to the states, then he must be proud of the destruction he has wrought: a 13% rise in infant mortality in Texas, the number of people traveling out of state for abortion care doubling in a year, Black and Indigenous people and Latinas shouldering an outsized proportion of the Dobbs damage, the rise of “maternity care deserts” and women bleeding out in hospital lobby bathrooms and parking lots until they’re near death enough to qualify for care under abortion bans. No matter what Trump says about abortion between now and November, his legacy of suffering and misery speaks for itself. That’s the election story that could, and ought to, run every single day until Nov. 5, because it’s information American voters desperately need and deserve to have. If only we could get it.
Andrea Grimes
Andrea Grimes is a journalist and activist living in Austin, Texas. 
