By Jamelle Bouie / The New York Times
Donald Trump pushed the Republican Party’s platform committee to change its language on abortion, and on the surface it looks like an exercise in relative moderation.
Where the 2016 and 2020 Republican platforms called for a national abortion ban, demanded a constitutional amendment to establish due-process rights for embryos and fetuses and stated that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” the 2024 platform simply states the Republican Party’s belief 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.”
This change, said NBC News and other outlets, is a “softening” of the party’s position on abortion.
But is it really?
The lodestar for the anti-abortion movement has always been a constitutional guarantee of fetal personhood, which would outlaw abortion and threaten the legality of both in vitro fertilization and hormonal birth control. (This endorsement of protection for fetal personhood also makes clear that the platform’s ostensible support for IVF is cheap political posturing.) To state, in the context of abortion, that the 14th Amendment guarantees due process and that legislatures are free to pass laws “protecting those rights” is to outright endorse the legal theory that the Constitution already outlaws abortion with or without amendment.
The new platform language may lack the specificity of the old, but it expresses the same basic commitment to vast restrictions on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Moreover, the Republican Party coalition is still grounded in the grass-roots activity of anti-abortion groups and the ideological ambitions of movement jurists and politicians. The platform makes no real difference in their efforts to ban abortion and limit a woman’s right to live a free life and pursue her own vision of the good.
It should be said as well that in the same way it is perverse for conservative legal activists and Supreme Court justices to use the Reconstruction amendments — written and ratified to assist the formerly enslaved and enshrine a principle of anti-subordination in the Constitution — to dismantle this nation’s halting efforts at substantive racial equality, it is also perverse for the anti-abortion movement to use the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against bodily autonomy in the name of so-called fetal rights.
Animating that amendment, as well as the 13th, was the reality that Black Americans could not be secure in their persons — in their bodies and reproductive capacities — as long as the badges, incidents and vestiges of chattel slavery endured in the nation’s constitutional order. If, in other words, American slavery rested on reproductive enslavement — the forced birth and breeding of men and women for profit — then anti-slavery had to mean reproductive liberation.
What the anti-abortion movement wants is a dark and cruel inversion of what the Reconstruction framers intended.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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