The Republican Party’s public abandonment of its long-standing position on one of the most controversial issues in American politics reflects the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling that had protected abortion rights for half a century.
Trump and other Republicans had long called for national restrictions, and the previous party platform endorsed a federal ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy. But Trump and several other leading members of the party shifted their positions after antiabortion forces suffered losses at the polls as red state after red state voted to protect or restore access to the procedure. Several battleground states, including Arizona and Nevada, are expected to have abortion referendums on the ballot this year.
A party platform is an image-making document, not a binding road map, and Trump himself has offered varied positions on abortion over the years. Still, many antiabortion advocates remain furious with the party’s shift on the issue. Antiabortion protesters hung outside the entrance to a Sunday night convention welcome party and greeted people with shouts, including “Blood, blood, blood on your hands!”
“GOP your hands are red!” they yelled as delegates and other attendees walked by, mostly ignoring them. Some held signs from Live Action, the antiabortion nonprofit. Others roved around and followed Senate candidate Kari Lake of Arizona down the street as she entered the welcome event, at one point yelling “Kari Lake and Donald Trump support abortion!”
Republican National Committee spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said that platform reflects Trump’s vision for a second term.
“The president is the leader of the party and he has built unity because of his winning record and his winning vision for the future, and he’s put together a team efficient at executing for him,” Alvarez said. “This team has gone and built consensus and spoken with delegates and made sure the support was there.”
Trump advisers said they wanted to cut down the platform in part to limit opponents’ ability to use the language against them.
The new platform also abandons the old document’s opposition to same-sex marriage, saying only that “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage.”
Trump personally reviewed and edited the draft platform before it was presented to members of a platform committee last week, Alvarez said. Committee members then voted to approve the text, 84-18, in a closed-door meeting in Milwaukee that broke with tradition in several ways. The meeting was not televised, as it usually is, and participants said the vote happened quickly and without the usual chance to workshop language in breakout groups.
Gayle Ruzicka, a veteran GOP activist who has attended the convention since 1992, was so furious after last week’s committee meeting that she declared in an interview viewed over 2.5 million times that “they rolled us.”
“That’s what they did,” Ruzicka, president of Utah Eagle Forum, told a local reporter. “We spent thousands of dollars to be here and everything they told us they were going to do isn’t what happened. None of it happened. I’ve never seen this happen before.”
The disagreements led to subtle but clear displays of protest Monday as delegates voted to pass the platform.
Eagle Forum, a socially conservative group, passed out buttons declaring “Republicans are Pro-Life.”
But Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Resource Council, said Monday afternoon that antiabortion advocates had scrapped plans for a floor fight on the abortion language in the platform due to the Saturday assassination attempt against Trump.
“Things have changed,” he said. “We don’t feel like now, given what’s happened, is the time to speak.”
Activists said they felt overshadowed by events.
“This was the second most important thing going on at the convention and now it’s the third,” one activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak critically about the convention, told The Washington Post.
The platform states “We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”
Some groups took that language as a win, including the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
“It is important that the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement last week. “Under this amendment, it is Congress that enacts and enforces its provisions. The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”
But to Ruzicka and others, the language was lacking because it did not clearly state that fetuses have a right to life.
“A sentence in there that says the unborn has the fundamental right to life,” she said. “That one sentence would make it pro life.”
Abbie Cheeseman contributed to this report.
