In her latest video, Mother Jones video creator Kat Abughazaleh traces the history of former President Donald Trump’s dangerous lie that some states allow parents to “execute” babies in so-called “post-birth abortions.”
“You can look at the governor of West Virginia,” Trump said during last week’s debate, prompting an incredulous head shake from Vice President Kamala Harris. “He said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute it.”
Northam, of course, did not say that. Trump wasn’t even correct about his own right-wing smear. His reference was to a wildly out-of-context quote from former Virginia governor Ralph Northam (not West Virginia). Northam’s 2019 radio appearance, in which he explained the tragic medical emergencies that can result in late-term abortions, has since been selectively edited by Republicans and used to claim their opponents are permitting infanticide—a lie that has been repeated with relish across Fox News, again and again.
As Kat explains, “There’s no such thing as a ‘post-birth’ abortion. These procedures are extremely rare and reserved for cases where the mother’s life is in danger or when a fatally ill or deformed baby needs palliative care.” In this video, Kat shows how this wasn’t Trump’s first time exploiting these tragedies, which are “designed to demonize grieving mothers and doctors,” while clarifying the facts about late-term abortion care that are too often lost to political noise. She notes that less than one percent of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy.
“By limiting abortion access in the first place, whether it’s totally or at the six-week mark, or by making parents jump through hoops just to get the medical care they need,” Kat explains, “Republicans are ensuring that there will be more cases that require traumatic medical intervention than if people were allowed to have control over their bodies in the first place.”
A number of prominent figures on the right and far right are once again engaged in energetic antisemitism; this time, Instagram personality Dan Bilzerian, a poker player and lifestyle influencer previously famous for posing with women on large boats, has climbed aboard. Bilzerian and two other masculinity influencers—accused human traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate—have increasingly pivoted to criticisms of Israel that promptly segue into antisemitic claims clearly rooted in the blood libel, a medieval conspiracy theory about Jews murdering Christians.
Bilzerian is grandiosely known as the “King of Instagram,” where he displays scenes of a lifestyle involving yachts, crowds of bikini-clad hangers-on, and exotic locales to 32 million followers. In the past few weeks, however, Bilzerian has been spouting wild conspiracies about the Israeli government, telling a podcaster that he believes it “knew about 9/11” (presumably in advance) and “had JFK assassinated.”
Last week Bilzerian was among those who shared a viral meme on Twitter/X claiming to show English translations of the Talmud, a foundational Jewish religious text, “proving” that it exists to justify the mistreatment and murder of non-Jews. These claims, which have been debunked many times over the last several centuries, seem to be largely sourced from antiquated antisemitic texts, like 1892’s The Talmud Unmasked. Besides being composed of outrageous lies—claiming, for instance, that Judaism permits the rape and murder of non-Jews—the meme cites a purported book of the Talmud that the American Jewish Committee identified as “altogether fictitious” in 1939.
“Antisemites trying to focus on the Talmud is almost as old as antisemitism gets,” explains Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, the social media editor of Chabad.org, the Judaism website run by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a branch of Orthodox Judaism. “You have places on the dark corners of the internet where people have compiled bits and pieces that are totally made up, or taken out of context. They have the same spelling mistakes and use made-up terms in Hebrew.”
The meme vastly oversimplifies what the Talmud is: an intricate text, composed of thousands of pages of summation of oral tradition, opinions from rabbis and sages, teachings, conversations and debates. While some observant Jews devote years to understanding its mysteries, antisemitic memes presume it is a literal rulebook by which modern-day Jews live, instead of a compilation of religious and ethical arguments written between the third and sixth centuries.
The Talmud is, Lightstone adds, written “in a language that isn’t accessible to the common person today.” Even at the time it was written, in a blend of Aramaic and Hebrew, it was “incomprehensible to the non-Jewish world,” making it even more attractive for antisemites looking to imbue it with meanings that would demonize Jews, and frame it, as Lightstone puts it, as “the things Jews don’t want you to see.”
Bilzerian isn’t alone among far-right influencers, where antisemitic rhetoric is on the rise as prominent conservatives like Candace Owens and Stew Peters make increasingly overt claims about Jewish people. While they are often cloaked in supposed critiques of the Israeli government’s invasion of Gaza, that isn’t always the case. Last week, for instance, Owens shared posts about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was murdered in Georgia in 1915 by a lynch mob that claimed he was guilty of rape, a claim most historians dispute. She stated without evidence that Frank was related to the founder of a cult “which practiced ritualistic incest and pedophilia.” (Owens has previously displayed an obsession with Frankism, a long-dead Jewish heretical sect from the 1700s that practiced sexual rituals, but had nothing whatsoever to do with Leo Frank.)
Owens has been joined by the Tate brothers,who she interviewed in Romania last year about the trafficking allegations against them, and who recently sat down with her for interviews again. This week, the Tates were raided at their Romanian compound for the second time, this time reportedly over allegations of sex with a minor. Upon his release, Tate retweeted a post from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, which read, “Just 2 days after Andrew Tate said that ‘the Matrix’ is really just the Jewish mafia—his house was raided and he was arrested again.”
Other masculinity influencers, like Rumble personality Sneako, celebrated their release. “Welcome home,” he tweeted, tagging the Tates. “Tell the truth, whatever the cost.” Later the same day he added in another tweet that “The Matrix is Israel.”
Posting any one thing for too long—whether it’s misogynist screeds, pictures of women in swimwear, or Andrew Tate’s omnipresent photos of himself smoking cigars—can leave an audience feeling bored and prone to drifting away. For Andrew Tate and Bilzerian, focusing on Israel’s assaults on Gaza brings not only novelty, but an appearance of moral high ground that such influencers don’t typically get to assume; their antisemitism also provides a new enemy that could be, for instance, useful as the human trafficking case against the Tates moves forward.
Chabad, the movement that Lightstone is part of, encourages less-observant Jews to learn more about their religious traditions. And while he’s disgusted by the meme, he hopes it, and the people like Bilzerian spreading it, might push someone to take time to look into the actual text.
“The Torah and the Talmud is here to bring truth and light to the world,” he says. “All of this hate is darkness and distraction from that purpose.”
The internet has been burning up this past week with the many, many faux pas—faux paws?—of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, what with his “childless cat ladies” thing, his endorsement of a reprehensible book by a reprehensible guy, and the foreword Vance wrote for yet another book, by Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts, even as Trump was trying to distance himself from that political dumpster fire.
It is fun, however, to take some of Vance’s more ridiculous assertions at face value, such as his claim that “the entire Democrat Party is like this childless cabal of people who don’t really care about the future.” (You didn’t think the Harris campaign was going to let that one go by, did you?)
Unearthed video: JD Vance calls Democrats a “childless cabal of people who don't really care about the future” pic.twitter.com/dfWKajTc7y
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—whom Vance namechecked as “childless” even as Buttigieg and his husband were in the midst of adopting a child—made the case quite eloquently to Jon Stewart that being childless and caring about your country’s future are not mutually exclusive. Exhibit A: The young people who volunteer for military service. Watch:
And then it’s worth asking: Is there even truth to this notion of Democrats being childless? I wasn’t about to waste my time looking up every member of Congress, but I did want to run a little truthiness test. So I looked up the parental status of every member of the House of Representatives from my liberal state of California—also the nation’s most populous state.
California has 52 House members: 40 Democrats, 12 Republicans.
Forty percent of those Democrats are women and only 16 percent of the Republicans are. Given the rigors of public office and the fact that moms are often saddled with the lion’s share of child care duties, you might then expect an overall higher rate of childlessness among the Democratic politicians. But you would be wrong.
With the caveat that one of the Democratic women has stepchildren, not biological ones, 85 percent of the Dems have kids, as opposed to 83 percent of the Republicans. If you exclude Rep. Sydney Kai Kamlager-Dove’s stepkids, which isn’t very nice, it becomes even: 83 percent for both.
For a reality check, I also looked at Georgia’s House delegation—9 Republicans, 5 Democrats. All of them have had kids except one: a Republican.
Let’s break down those numbers. On the Democratic side, 88 percent of the male reps have kids and 81 percent of the women do—three-quarters if you exclude the poor stepkids. The Cali Republicans have only two women in their caucus—both with kids—while 8 of the 10 men have them. (And, to be fair, one of the childless ones was just recently married.)
The remaining childless Republican dude, a MAGA type known for his adamant opposition to abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, tried to tell local police back in 1993 that he and the prostitute he was doing stuff with in his car were “just talking.” (He later admitted they were having sex.) But debauchery has no party affiliation: In 1986, one of the childless male Dems had been cited by police for soliciting prostitution.
The other two childless Democratic men are openly gay, and of the four Democratic women with no biological children, one is 35 and unmarried—though in a relationship, so who knows? We don’t know the story with the others, and even Vance concedes that plenty of people who want kids can’t have them for all sorts of reasons.
So what is this guy even talking about? Based on my California House sample, Dems are no more likely to be childless than Republicans are. I would predict the national numbers aren’t much different—there’s a fun weekend project if any of my media colleagues want to take it on.
For a reality check, though, I looked at Georgia’s House delegation—nine Republicans, five Democrats. Republican Andrew Clyde, a firearms dealer, is the only one of them who hasn’t had kids, although he does have a doberman named Kit. Georgia Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, who is Black, used to have a child. She ran for Congress only after her son, Jordan, was murdered at a gas station by a 46-year-old white man complaining about Jordan and his friends’ “loud music.”
The upshot of this little experiment, I suppose, is that if America’s childless are indeed some sort of cabal, it would appear to be pretty minor—and bipartisan. But a hearty thank you to JD for making it all possible.
The fate of gender-affirming care for transgender youth in Ohio will soon rest in one person’s hands. For the past week, Franklin County Judge Michael Holbrook has heard a case challenging a recent state law that includes a ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth. Now, it’s up to him to decide whether to turn a temporary block on the law into a permanent one—which would make Ohio just the third state to do so as a growing body of anti-trans laws moves through the courts.
From his chambers on the fifth floor of a downtown Columbus courthouse, the judge has heard pleas from the parents of trans children whose lives have been saved by gender-affirming care, physicians from the state’s children’s hospitals, and national experts in trans care. He’s also heard the state’s sharp defense of its law, featuring what is being framed as the “expert” testimony of nationally prominent anti-trans activists who made dubious claims about the efficacy and risks of puberty blockers, hormones, and other gender-affirming medical treatment.
Ohio’s sweeping law, dubbed the “Saving Adolescents from Experimentation” or “SAFE” Act, doesn’t just block the use of puberty blockers and hormones in trans youth (while allowing such medical interventions for cisgender children who may need them for precocious puberty or polycystic ovary syndrome). Passed by a GOP supermajority in January over Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto, it also prohibits trans girls and women from playing women’s sports, including college athletics. The ACLU of Ohio is challenging the entire law as a violation of the state’s single-subject rule for legislation, which requires that bills must pertain to one topic. The state says that topic is “addressing gender transition in children,” but the trial mainly focused on what the families of two trans girls have argued is the discriminatory, life-threatening impact of the ban ongender-affirming care.
“She laid down and wept in my bed. She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”
Ohio is among the 25 states with laws on the books restricting gender-affirming care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and 39 percentof trans youth live in states with such policies. While most bans have been challenged—and several temporarily blocked, like Ohio’s—the vast majority remain in effect. Only policies in Florida and Arkansas have been permanently enjoined, while the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case this coming term about the constitutionality of trans care bans.
On Monday, the mother of a 12-year-old trans girl testified that when her daughter began publicly identifying as a girl, her anxiety “melted away.” The daughter, going by the alias “Grace Goe,” has received gender-affirming mental health care for seven years and hopes to medically suppress puberty at its onset. The prospect of not being able to access that medical care has caused immense distress for Goe and her family. “She laid down and wept in my bed,” her mother said of Goe learning of the ban. “She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”
The state of Ohio showcased its line of experts, including Jamie Reed, aself-identified “whistleblower,” whose claims about a Missouri gender clinic have been widely disputed by families of the clinic’s current and former patients. Another Ohio witness was James Cantor, a Canadian sex researcher who has testified in support of gender-affirming care bans in trials across the country.
Cantor, a PhD who has never diagnosed a child with gender dysphoria or served on a child’s gender-affirming care team, claimed US studies on gender-affirming care are “sloppy” and that such care causes “sterility in children.” While hormones are known to cause temporary infertility, the long-term effects are unknown—which is why the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organization for gender-affirming care providers, recommends providers and patients extensively discuss fertility impacts and options before initiating such treatments. (Some forms of gender-affirming surgery do cause permanent infertility, but foryears the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association has assured lawmakers it is not being offered to trans youth in Ohio.)
And as my colleague Madison Pauly revealed last year, it’s not medical professionals or swaths of people who have stopped gender-affirming care proposing these bans to state legislators; many are conservative Christian organizations that believe transness is something to be “cured.”
As the trial wraps up on Friday, it bears repeating what actual experts testified: Dr. Sarah Corathers, an endocrinologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who has served on care teams for about 300 trans youth over the past decade, said she’s seen patients’ quality of life improve under her care. “When medically indicated, gender-affirming medical treatment is safe, effective, and well-established,” she said. Dr. Jack Turban, the director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Gender Psychiatry program, explained the widely accepted protocols clinicians in Ohio and elsewhere use for offering such care to trans youth, including using a multidisciplinary team of providers, offering comprehensive mental health support, and making every decision in concert with the trans child and their parents. He noted that every major medical organization opposes bans on gender-affirming care.
The fate of gender-affirming care for transgender youth in Ohio will soon rest in one person’s hands. For the past week, Franklin County Judge Michael Holbrook has heard a case challenging a recent state law that includes a ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth. Now, it’s up to him to decide whether to turn a temporary block on the law into a permanent one—which would make Ohio just the third state to do so as a growing body of anti-trans laws moves through the courts.
From his chambers on the fifth floor of a downtown Columbus courthouse, the judge has heard pleas from the parents of trans children whose lives have been saved by gender-affirming care, physicians from the state’s children’s hospitals, and national experts in trans care. He’s also heard the state’s sharp defense of its law, featuring what is being framed as the “expert” testimony of nationally prominent anti-trans activists who made dubious claims about the efficacy and risks of puberty blockers, hormones, and other gender-affirming medical treatment.
Ohio’s sweeping law, dubbed the “Saving Adolescents from Experimentation” or “SAFE” Act, doesn’t just block the use of puberty blockers and hormones in trans youth (while allowing such medical interventions for cisgender children who may need them for precocious puberty or polycystic ovary syndrome). Passed by a GOP supermajority in January over Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto, it also prohibits trans girls and women from playing women’s sports, including college athletics. The ACLU of Ohio is challenging the entire law as a violation of the state’s single-subject rule for legislation, which requires that bills must pertain to one topic. The state says that topic is “addressing gender transition in children,” but the trial mainly focused on what the families of two trans girls have argued is the discriminatory, life-threatening impact of the ban ongender-affirming care.
“She laid down and wept in my bed. She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”
Ohio is among the 25 states with laws on the books restricting gender-affirming care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and 39 percentof trans youth live in states with such policies. While most bans have been challenged—and several temporarily blocked, like Ohio’s—the vast majority remain in effect. Only policies in Florida and Arkansas have been permanently enjoined, while the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case this coming term about the constitutionality of trans care bans.
On Monday, the mother of a 12-year-old trans girl testified that when her daughter began publicly identifying as a girl, her anxiety “melted away.” The daughter, going by the alias “Grace Goe,” has received gender-affirming mental health care for seven years and hopes to medically suppress puberty at its onset. The prospect of not being able to access that medical care has caused immense distress for Goe and her family. “She laid down and wept in my bed,” her mother said of Goe learning of the ban. “She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”
The state of Ohio showcased its line of experts, including Jamie Reed, aself-identified “whistleblower,” whose claims about a Missouri gender clinic have been widely disputed by families of the clinic’s current and former patients. Another Ohio witness was James Cantor, a Canadian sex researcher who has testified in support of gender-affirming care bans in trials across the country.
Cantor, a PhD who has never diagnosed a child with gender dysphoria or served on a child’s gender-affirming care team, claimed US studies on gender-affirming care are “sloppy” and that such care causes “sterility in children.” While hormones are known to cause temporary infertility, the long-term effects are unknown—which is why the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organization for gender-affirming care providers, recommends providers and patients extensively discuss fertility impacts and options before initiating such treatments. (Some forms of gender-affirming surgery do cause permanent infertility, but foryears the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association has assured lawmakers it is not being offered to trans youth in Ohio.)
And as my colleague Madison Pauly revealed last year, it’s not medical professionals or swaths of people who have stopped gender-affirming care proposing these bans to state legislators; many are conservative Christian organizations that believe transness is something to be “cured.”
As the trial wraps up on Friday, it bears repeating what actual experts testified: Dr. Sarah Corathers, an endocrinologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who has served on care teams for about 300 trans youth over the past decade, said she’s seen patients’ quality of life improve under her care. “When medically indicated, gender-affirming medical treatment is safe, effective, and well-established,” she said. Dr. Jack Turban, the director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Gender Psychiatry program, explained the widely accepted protocols clinicians in Ohio and elsewhere use for offering such care to trans youth, including using a multidisciplinary team of providers, offering comprehensive mental health support, and making every decision in concert with the trans child and their parents. He noted that every major medical organization opposes bans on gender-affirming care.
These are the classy terms right-wing media has used to caricature Kamala Harris over the last four years. Following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the possibility of a Kamala takeover has jumped from a fever-dream conspiracy theory on right-wing airwaves to a real possibility, leaving right-wing media scrambling. As journalist Kat Abughazaleh dissects in her debut video essay for Mother Jones, the usual misogynistic tricks aren’t cutting it—at least when compared to their multi-decade propagandistic masterpiece: Hillary Clinton, Empress Dowager of Evil. Have the usual Fox-type commentators shot themselves in the foot and inadvertently made Kamala even more resilient?
“The national electorate isn’t already primed to turn against her with Pavlovian ease,” Kat explains. “They don’t have a trigger phrase like Benghazi or a sticky nickname like Crooked Hillary.”
Yes, Harris endures an enormous amount of racist, sexist bullshit from Fox News and the far-right noise machine. And if there’s one thing to be said about right-wing media, it’s that it can adapt, and adapt fast. But after Harris’ four years as vice president, the right’s attacks on her as a so-called “DEI Vice President” are still falling short of the toxic misogyny that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election. In this video, Kat outlines right-wing media’s favorite jabs against Harris, how they differ from their endless campaign against Hillary, and why they are now firing on all cylinders to reinvent the Kamala narrative for their viewers before it’s too late.
Top illustration: Mother Jones; Lawrence Jackson/White House/Planet Pix/Zuma; Fox News; Media Matters for America
These are the classy terms right-wing media has used to caricature Kamala Harris over the last four years. Following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the possibility of a Kamala takeover has jumped from a fever-dream conspiracy theory on right-wing airwaves to a real possibility, leaving right-wing media scrambling. As journalist Kat Abughazaleh dissects in her debut video essay for Mother Jones, the usual misogynistic tricks aren’t cutting it—at least when compared to their multi-decade propagandistic masterpiece: Hillary Clinton, Empress Dowager of Evil. Have the usual Fox-type commentators shot themselves in the foot and inadvertently made Kamala even more resilient?
“The national electorate isn’t already primed to turn against her with Pavlovian ease,” Kat explains. “They don’t have a trigger phrase like Benghazi or a sticky nickname like Crooked Hillary.”
Yes, Harris endures an enormous amount of racist, sexist bullshit from Fox News and the far-right noise machine. And if there’s one thing to be said about right-wing media, it’s that it can adapt, and adapt fast. But after Harris’ four years as vice president, the right’s attacks on her as a so-called “DEI Vice President” are still falling short of the toxic misogyny that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election. In this video, Kat outlines right-wing media’s favorite jabs against Harris, how they differ from their endless campaign against Hillary, and why they are now firing on all cylinders to reinvent the Kamala narrative for their viewers before it’s too late.
Top illustration: Mother Jones; Lawrence Jackson/White House/Planet Pix/Zuma; Fox News; Media Matters for America
If you readcoverage of the Republican Party platform in major news outlets lately—the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Fox News, for example—you may come away with the impression that the GOP has “softened” its stance on abortion.
That is, in fact, exactly what Republicans would like you to think. It’s also wrong.
The new platform doesn’t explicitly spell out the party’s desire to enact a national abortion ban, which many major news outlets took as evidence of the alleged “softening.” It’s also shorter—only four sentences long—and far less detailed than the anti-abortion platforms of the party’s past, which opposed public funding for organizations that perform abortions and promoted the appointment of anti-abortion judges, among other measures.
But according to legal experts, the new platform does pose an insidious threat to abortion rights by hinting at enshrining the concept of “fetal personhood” in the law—a long-running goal for the right—which would amount to a de facto national abortion ban. It also peddles contradictory promises, such as seeming to promote fetal personhood while also pledging support for IVF, which involves the disposal of embryos and would therefore be functionally impossible alongside fetal personhood.
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. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).
The Fourteenth Amendment, which addresses the rights of citizens, is what the Republican platform has cited as the key to fetal personhood since 1984, when the party first articulated its support for “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” And, lest you forget, just last month, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have protected contraception access at the federal level and blocked another bill that would have protected IVF.
So if you’re confounded by the GOP’s promises to leave abortion rights to the states and suddenly support access to contraception and IVF, you’re not alone. “I think the strategy is to be confusing,” Mary Ziegler, a leading abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis, told me, adding, “I think that Trump’s hope is that he can be confusing enough that everyone, regardless of their views on abortion, can vote for him.”
My reading of the GOP platform on abortion: it continues the theme of Trump's campaign, which is to be confusing and therefore possibly acceptable to deeply different constituencies. How? /1 https://t.co/qbT8YIv9v0
Elizabeth Sepper, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law whose scholarly work has focused on reproductive rights, told me she sees the new platform as “100 percent, a commitment to fetal personhood,” adding that she believes it also relies on “constitutional ignorance” over how the Fourteenth Amendment could be marshaled to enact a federal abortion ban.
Confusion over what to make of the platform also appeared to be present on the right, where some anti-abortion advocates praised the platform, while others lambasted it for not going far enough for their liking.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, said in a statement Monday in response to the platform, “It is important that the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment.” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, celebrated the platform’s reference to the Fourteenth Amendment as “an open door to passing strong pro-life federal legislation”; she also noted that she and others advocating for the passage of the Life at Conception Act are “using the Fourteenth Amendment to justify why abortion, all abortion, should be ended throughout our country.” But Hawkins also said the updated RNC platform was “disappointing” in casting abortion as a stateissue.
Also in the critical camp were Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who called the new platform “a profound disappointment to the millions of pro-life Republicans” and urged delegates to “restore language to our party’s platform recognizing the sanctity of human life and affirming that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” and Lila Rose, president of the anti-abortion group Live Action, who characterized the latest anti-abortion platform as “downgraded” from those of years past—and blamed Trump for approving it and trying to walk back his anti-abortion stances.
The Biden campaign also blasted attempts to characterize Trump as easing up on abortion: “Donald Trump has made it clear with his own words and actions what he will do if he regains power—rip away women’s freedoms, punish women, and ban abortion nationwide,” campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. (As I’ve reported, Trump could also enact a nationwide abortion ban via the Comstock Act, which his acolytes at Project 2025 have urged him to marshal to ban mail delivery of medication abortion.)
The Trump campaign, on the other hand, praised the new Republican National Committee platform. Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.”
But spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the RNC did not immediately respond to Mother Jones’ questions on whether Trump and the GOP more broadly support fetal personhood in law, how they square their claim to back expanding contraception and IVF access with Senate Republicans blocking votes on those issues last month, and how they respond to Republican critics like Pence.
As Ziegler sees it, evading questions about the platform’s details is likely a strategic move. “Being vague is technically a ‘softening’ over being clear and pro-personhood—but primarily, it’s a question mark,” she said. “If we don’t know what it means, it might not be a ‘softening’ at all.”
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