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Trump’s flip-flop on abortion speaks volumes
Donald Trump was for abortion rights before he was against them. He promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would repeal Roe v. Wade. He did and they did. Then he supported a nationwide abortion ban. Now he doesn’t. He sees the polls and says the issue should be left to the states.
There’s a truck thundering down the middle of that road. It bears Arizona, Alabama and Florida license plates.
What the Arizona Supreme Court did last week to ban abortion and to imprison doctors for performing them is a glaring example of what’s wrong with leaving the issue to the states. So are the state supreme court decisions that are banning most abortions in Florida and prohibiting in vitro fertilization in Alabama.
The Arizona news broke hours after Trump had planted himself on what he mistook for a safe middle ground.
Pleasing no one
The most strident anti-abortion zealots have never meant to settle for state’s rights and the mere repeal of Roe. They have always intended for all American women to submit to their theocracy. They are unhappy with Trump’s newfound feigned moderation. They have no choice, perhaps, but to stick with him in this election.
But the majority of Americans who favor legal abortion in all or most cases — including a majority of independents — will not forget what Trump did or trust him now.
The question is not whether there will be a voter backlash but only how significant it will be. Arizona, a swing state, may have an abortion rights initiative on the November ballot. Florida already does.
In attempting to pose as some sort of moderate, Trump says he favors abortion rights in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is in danger. Florida’s six-week ban, which takes effect May 1, allows for those exceptions in limited cases, but the 1864 law that Arizona’s Supreme Court has revived is a total ban except to save a woman’s life.
Trump says the Arizona court went too far and “it will be straightened out,” but didn’t say how. Kari Lake, the leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, had praised the 1864 law before the court took it off the shelf. Now, she says it is too extreme.
As if taking their cue from Trump, Florida Sen. Rick Scott and other Republican politicians have been seeking refuge in the states’ rights theory.
But reproductive freedom should be recognized as an inalienable human right. Even as most of the world has been liberalizing abortion rights, the U.S. has been moving in the wrong direction.
Your rights betrayed
Abortion rights were betrayed in Arizona by prostituting its Supreme Court to politics, as in Florida. Like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, took control of how judges are nominated. He also packed the court by expanding it from five seats to seven.
One difference is that Arizona Justice William G. Montgomery, who had accused Planned Parenthood, a party to the case, of being “responsible for the greatest generational genocide known to man,” recused himself, properly so. The commission that nominates appellate judges in Arizona had refused to recommend him before Ducey replaced several commission members.
Florida Justice Charles Canady, a lifelong abortion opponent whose legislator wife co-sponsored Florida’s looming six-week ban, should have recused and did not.
Law’s strange history
The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her column “Letters from An American,” called it an “interesting spin” to say the dusty
Arizona law reflects the voters’ will.
It was written in 1864, when “Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvetlined cases.”
The law, set amid the Civil War, appeared aimed primarily at controlling “a lawless population of men,” Richardson wrote.
It also dealt with dueling. It mentioned “miscarriage” only in the context of poisoning, with an exemption for a physician acting to save a woman’s life.
“So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as 10 to be able to consent to sex,” Richardson wrote. “And in 2024, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.”
The issue before the court was whether to enforce that rather than a recent law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks. The majority dismissed the new law on the theory that it was based on Roe v. Wade.
That is how far right-wing judges can go — and in fact, how far Florida’s Supreme Court did — when reproductive freedom is at the mercy of localized politics.
Congress should enact the central premise of Roe v. Wade — that abortion is primarily an issue of personal privacy, best left to a woman and her physicians. Like Texas before them, Alabama, Arizona and Florida have made a compelling case for that. Trump and Scott, with their new-found faux moderation, are not by any means on the right side.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sunsentinel.com.