Arizona’s Draconian Abortion Ban Belongs to Trump
Trump says he wants states to determine abortion policy. What that looks like in practice is Arizona reviving a 160-year-old ban on nearly all abortions.
In the nearly two years since Donald Trump gleefully took credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, it has become abundantly clear that abortion is a losing issue for Republicans. So the former president has naturally tried to shift gears on abortion in his own campaign for a second term. After floating the idea of a “very reasonable” national 15-week ban in March, he posted a video statement to Truth Social on Monday declaring that the legality of abortion is for states to determine.
“The states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” he says in the video, noting that many states “will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others.”
“At the end of the day, it’s all about will of the people,” Trump insisted. “That’s where we are right now, and that’s what we want — the will of the people.”
Trump’s logic was put to the test the very next day, when Arizona’s supreme court decided to revive a 160-year-old law banning almost all abortions in the state, with no exceptions for rape and incest. So a law that was enacted in 1864 — 55 years before women had the right to vote and before Arizona was even a state — now supplants the state’s existing 15-week ban on abortion despite the fact that a majority of Arizonans support legal abortion in all or most cases. Even Kari Lake, the election-results-denying, QAnon-backed Republican running for Senate who praised her state’s zombie law just two years ago, quickly issued a statement denouncing the court’s decision as “out of step with Arizonans.” Yet Trump didn’t just pave the way for the court to override the will of its constituents; he effectively endorsed this extreme outcome.
Arizona is not the first example of how kicking abortion back to the states subverts “the will of the people.” Everywhere voters have been allowed to weigh in on abortion via ballot measure after Dobbs — even in red states — they have chosen to protect abortion rights. Yet Republican lawmakers are overriding their constituents at every turn and ramming through unpopular, draconian bans on the procedure. Texas enacted an unhinged bounty-hunter abortion law that incentivizes people to spy on one another; North Carolina Republicans schemed with a Democrat to have her switch parties to help them pass a vetoproof 12-week abortion ban; and Florida lawmakers passed a draconian ban on abortion at six weeks, which is before many women even realize they’re pregnant. GOP lawmakers in Ohio went as far as trying to undermine a pro-abortion ballot measure that voters approved in the courts; their efforts to stop the new constitutional amendment from taking effect have been unsuccessful.
Trump has endorsed all of these bans and craven tactics by suggesting that state legislatures, many of which are gerrymandered to hell, should be allowed to pass any kind of abortion restriction they feel like passing. If his disingenuousness on the issue weren’t already obvious, the moment Republican senator Lindsay Graham and anti-abortion activists pushed back on his latest comments, he basically told them to STFU until he wins reelection.
“Many good Republicans lost elections because of this issue, and people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the presidency,” he snapped back on Truth Social.
The subtext here is that Trump would be very open to signing a federal abortion ban if it were to come across his desk in a nonelection year. As president, he could also direct the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act, a dormant 1873 law that could effectively ban abortion nationwide, much like what just happened in Arizona. In that case, Trump wouldn’t even have to sign any anti-abortion legislation. Twenty-six Republican senators and 119 Republican House members have already signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to ban abortion via the Comstock Act.
Trump would be far from the first Republican to lie about sending abortion policy back to the states, as the party has been using that deceitful framing for years to soften the blow of overturning Roe. But it’s important to note that even without any federal abortion ban in place, state-level restrictions are having catastrophic effects on women facing charges over their pregnancy outcomes and being denied lifesaving abortions in the most extreme of circumstances.
Any candidate who doesn’t outright promise to protect abortion rights at a federal level with proactive legislation has no regard for “the will of the people.” Because if the voters had much say in the matter, there would be no state abortion bans in the first place. Reviving zombie abortion laws from the 1800s will make it that much harder for any Republican, but especially Trump, to make the case for themselves by November.