Listen Closely to the Men Crafting the GOP’s Anti-Abortion Policy

Ed Martin, one of three men leading the Republican Party platform process next week, has said he refuses to answer questions about jailing women for having an abortion. This isn’t because Martin opposes that kind of punishment, but because he believes it is ceding power to “the left” should he acknowledge the possibility that the anti-abortion laws he and many other Republicans support could be used to incarcerate people.

“What do you do with the woman who has an abortion? I don’t think we have a good answer yet,” Martin said in 2022 on his podcast, Pro America Report, days after the American public learned, through a leaked opinion, that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. “But if you believe it’s a baby—I do—then you have to do something to protect the baby.” Still, Martin, who is president of the right-wing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, and a “Stop the Steal” activist who was at the Capitol on January 6, didn’t provide a direct answer. He went further, counseling against it. “If you take their framing, it’s a woman’s right, are you going to put women in jail, no—it’s about a baby. Now what do we do? Frame the argument.”

This was just one of several revealing sentiments shared by Martin on his podcast, reported by CNN this week. “No abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother—none. Zero. Zilch,” he said in another episode, and he characterized stories of such lifesaving abortions as “Planned Parenthood propaganda.” He also said the protests after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe pushed a “hoax” that people care about abortion rights.

Martin’s comment about “framing” may be less incendiary, but it is especially revealing. It suggests how little substantive policy disagreement there is on abortion on the right—despite what you may have read about Donald Trump’s supposed stabs at moderation. To the extent that there is a conflict within his Republican Party about how to make anti-abortion laws more punitive, it is a conflict about messaging—not a conflict about punishment.

The Republican Party will be revising its platform next week for the first time since 2016. Martin, along with a former Trump ambassador and a former Trump administration official, will oversee the process. Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups have mounted a public pressure campaign to ensure that the platform committee does not weaken provisions in the 2016 platform that call for a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks and a constitutional amendment extending legal personhood to embryos and fetuses.

“If the Trump campaign decides to remove national protections for the unborn in the GOP platform, it would be a miscalculation that would hurt party unity and destroy pro-life enthusiasm between now and the election,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said Tuesday.

Their fear is that Trump is backing away from this extremist position, having said earlier this year that he wouldn’t sign a federal ban and that abortion should be left to “the states.” In June, a senior Trump adviser told CNN that the campaign expects the platform to reflect “the policy and vision and agenda of President Trump.” (The Trump campaign also apparently blocked two anti-abortion activists from the platform committee, Politico reported Tuesday.)

Martin’s statements on his podcast, in which he effectively acknowledges how bad it looks to support the idea of criminal punishment for abortion, may help clarify this purported conflict. Leading Republicans, knowing their punitive stance on abortion is (correctly) regarded as repressive and unjust, will try to obscure or outright lie about their extremist position—and do so openly, to the press, without shame. In this respect, they’re following Trump’s lead. He may claim he doesn’t support the more extreme anti-abortion positions, as represented by Martin and Dannenfelser, but his actions negate his words. When you appoint Supreme Court justices with the explicit intention of overturning Roe, knowing that it will instantly lead to total abortion bans in some states, and when you speak to organizations that want abortion “eradicated entirely,” there can be no confusion about your stance.

While the tension over the party platform tells us there’s some disagreement about how the party should communicate its extremist position, it tells us very little about the future of abortion policy under a potential second Trump term.

One anti-abortion leader who helped craft previous GOP platforms is actually ready to dustbin the 20-week ban. James Bopp Jr., general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, called it “a remnant of a strategy to overturn Roe v. Wade.” The ban was meant to get around the viability standard in Roe, commonly understood to limit abortion after 23 weeks, by asserting that a fetus could feel pain at 20 weeks—a concept that has no basis in science or medical ethics, but which has been strategically advanced by anti-abortion groups to pass state-level gestational bans. (Some abortion rights defenders, as well as national medical groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are now advocating for an end to abortion laws based on the subjective concept of viability.) Arguing over a 20-week ban also feels fairly quaint when nearly half of the states have enacted more restrictive bans, including the total abortion bans in 14 states.

As for getting some kind of national ban, however, leading Republican groups, including former Trump administration officials, already have other, bigger plans. “The action in the next administration is going to revolve around undoing the Biden administration’s actions on abortion as opposed to a national gestation protection,” Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, told The Washington Post in April. Setting aside the cringey framing of national abortion bans as “national gestation protection,” Severino’s proposals here render much of the GOP platform debate on abortion moot.

Under Trump, Severino ran the civil rights office in the Department of Health and Human Services. Most recently, he authored the section on HHS in the Heritage Foundation–led Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” a guide for the possible future Trump administration. In it, the groups behind Project 2025 call for rolling back the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion. (The recent Supreme Court decisions in Loper Bright and Corner Post, which take power away from federal agencies, could make those rollbacks easier.) They also push the arguably baseless theory that the 150-year-old Comstock Act could be revived as a day-one national prohibition on all abortions, requiring no new ban be passed. Why get into a difficult fight over rewriting the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to embryos and fetuses, when you can just dust off a law already on the books?

The comments about criminal punishment for abortion made by Ed Martin, given his role as the deputy policy director for the GOP platform committee, are disturbing enough. But the background of committee policy director Russ Vought puts them in a more alarming context. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, whose administration he celebrated as ushering in “a golden chapter” for the anti-abortion movement. Students for Life of America has called Vought “the man behind the plan to defund Planned Parenthood,” owing to his success in forcing the group out of Title X, the federal family planning program. (Vought, like Martin, believes that “the 2020 election was stolen,” and has referred to those charged with criminal offenses related to January 6 as “political prisoners.”)

Vought currently heads the Center for Renewing America, now a lead part of the Project 2025 effort. More than hair-splitting about gestational bans, Vought has a much broader scale of conflict in mind. His group is working on its own plans for Trump, a bullet point list that includes “Christian nationalism.” He’s said he would hand the president more power over the Department of Justice, which he regards as “not an independent agency.” Getting DOJ on board, whether by influence or by taking overt control, would be important should a new administration wish to revive a law from 1873 banning abortion, or start criminally punishing people for abortion. Vought has the experience and the plans that could back up the kinds of things Martin has dreamt about on his podcast.

The word “extreme” is perhaps overused when it comes to abortion. But when applied to men who are already in positions of mainstream political power, what does “extreme” mean anymore? Even if the Republican Party should remove its support for a 20-week ban from its platform, that should not be misinterpreted as some kind of move away from “extremism.” Vought and other Trump advisers are busy concocting anti-abortion policies that make a 20-week federal ban look tame—and they’re telling us all about it, should we choose to listen.