Written by by Joan McCarter at dailykos.com
While some Republican candidates, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, really don’t want to talk about abortion bans and Republican strategists are trying to change the subject to contraception, forced birth activists aren’t going to let them. They will make a national abortion ban an issue for 2024, including for Donald Trump.
Trump has famously been all over the place on the issue, veering from stating unequivocally “I am very pro-choice” in 1999 to advocating “some form of punishment” for women obtaining abortion in 2016. More recently, he’s criticized Republican states that have banned abortion with no exceptions and suggested he could make some kind of a deal on the “number of weeks or months or however you want to define it” in which abortions could be performed. “Other than certain parts of the country, you can’t — you’re not going to win on this issue. But you will win on this issue when you come up with the right number of weeks.”
Suffice it to say Trump’s not a big thinker when it comes to this issue, and the forced birth movement knows it. They are also convinced they’ll have him if he makes it back into the White House, because they know he needs them to win again. “Is he the most pro-life person? No,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told The Washington Post. “But he keeps his deals.”