Last week, after the Republican National Committee adopted its latest party platform, major news outlets—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even Fox News—reported that the GOP had “softened” its stance on abortion, since the platform did not explicitly call for a national abortion ban.
As I reported, though, leading legal scholars begged to differ: The platform invokes the Fourteenth Amendment, which the GOP has, for decades, cited as the key to enshrining fetal personhood in the law. That would amount to a de facto national abortion ban by establishing embryos as US citizens entitled to “equal protection of the laws,” among other rights.
Now, there’s proof that a top RNC official who helped craft the platform agrees—and wants everyone to know that the party is not softening its increasingly extreme anti-abortion stance.
A day after the adoption of the platform, Ed Martin—president of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, a conservative group, and one of three people the RNC and the Trump campaign appointed to run the committee that wrote the platform—appeared to suggest on his radio show, Pro America Report, that the platform signals support for a federal abortion ban: “It’s got protections for pro-life. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s not protections for pro-life,” Martin said. “There’s not as many words describing it, but there’s protection under the Constitution, that life is protected.”
Some news outlets reporting that the GOP had “softened” its stance on abortion cited the absence of a call for a “human life amendment” to the Constitution, which was present in the previous GOP platform. But Mary Ziegler, a leading abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis, said Martin’s new comments make clear that “the reason they didn’t need the human life amendment anymore, and the reason this platform is different, is because it’s saying the Constitution already protects fetal rights.”
Martin has a long history of strong anti-abortion stances; as CNN reported earlier this month, he has publicly said that he opposes exceptions to abortion, signaled support for punishing people who receive abortions and doctors who provide them, and said he “would like to see US Senators and US congressmen and women elected to office who would say, ‘Let’s ban abortion.'” But these latest comments—which have not been previously reported—signal the clearest response yet to charges that the party has “softened” its stance on abortion since releasing its platform last week, as well as the clearest indication of how at least one person involved in crafting it sees its potential to ban abortion nationwide.
In the episode, Martin goes on to say that the platform notes that “the states can readily pass laws now that Roe v. Wade is eliminated,” and that it also invokes the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But as Rachel Rebouché, dean of the law school at Temple University and a leading reproductive rights scholar, pointed out, those two assertions are contradictory: “A constitutional right to life for fetuses would accomplish an end to abortion across the country,” she wrote in an email, “which is not what Dobbs purported to do—[which is to] return abortion to states even if they permit it.” (As I also reported last week, fetal personhood would also make IVF functionally impossible, given that it involves the disposal of embryos—despite the fact that the platform claims the GOP will support IVF access.)
Ziegler agrees: “Those two things are mutually exclusive, because if you understand fetal personhood the way they do, it means that liberal laws on abortion in the states violate the federal constitution.”
Martin also touts the platform’s “opposition to a late term abortion, however you define that.” For him, though, there’s no ambiguity in what that term—which is not, in fact, used by medical professionals—means. In what are perhaps his most striking comments, he says, “I call a late term abortion any abortion that is done after the baby is conceived, myself, in part because the term ‘late term abortion’ and some of the distinction of trimesters and all that was Roe v. Wade construct—it was made-up,” he says. “It was a made-up way to make us think past the sale, that there’s something that’s not a baby, not a baby, not a baby. Ah, you get to the third trimester, now it’s a baby? That’s nonsense.”
“Anyway, the pro-life stuff is great,” Martin concludes on the radio episode. “It’s strong.” (You can listen to his full comments here, beginning just after the nine-minute mark.)
Neither Martin, the RNC, nor the Trump campaign immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Monday seeking clarification on Martin’s comments and asking whether they represent the positions of the RNC and the Trump campaign.
Trump has, during his campaign, claimed he would leave abortion rights “to the states” after appointing three of the five conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe; he has also said, including at the debate, that he supports exceptions for “rape, incest, and the life of the mother”—though reports suggest those exceptions are seldom granted in practice. After the release of the platform last week, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Trump “has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.”
But to Rebouché, the Temple University scholar, the implications of Martin’s comments suggest otherwise: “I think this doubles down on some Republicans’ commitments to anti-abortion strategies, and those strategies have always, since Roe and after Dobbs, been to recognize rights conferred at conception and to end abortion nationwide.”
To Ziegler, Martin’s comments make one thing clear: “We certainly can understand that the platform isn’t a ‘softening,'” she said. “As to what it means about what Trump’s going to do in office,” she continued, “the question is, who knows? Because that entire campaign has been designed to obscure the answers.”
Thanks to Ed Martin, though, it seems we now have a little more clarity.
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