Trump personally supports a 16-week abortion ban

Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he supports a national 16-week abortion ban, with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the mother's life, according to two people with direct consent . knowledge of Mr. Trump's deliberations.

Mr. Trump has studiously avoided taking a clear position on abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned in mid-2022, boosting Democrats ahead of that year's midterm elections. He has said privately that he wants to wait until the Republican presidential primary is over to publicly discuss his views because he does not want to risk alienating social conservatives before securing the nomination, the two people said.

Mr. Trump has taken a transactional approach to abortion since he became a candidate in 2015, and his current private conversations reflect that same approach.

One thing Trump likes about a federal ban on 16-week abortions is that it's a round number. “You know what I like about 16?” Mr Trump told one of these people, who were granted anonymity to describe a private conversation. 'It is the same. It's four months.”

When discussing potential vice presidential candidates, Mr. Trump often asks if they are “OK on abortion.” He is immediately dismissive when he hears that a Republican does not support “the three exceptions.” He tells advisers that Republicans will continue to lose elections with that stance.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Mr. Trump told advisers he believed the decision would be damaging to Republicans. Since then, he has believed that the abortion issue is largely responsible for a string of Republican losses in congressional races.

And he is well aware of his own vulnerability: he appointed the three judges who made this decision possible, a fact for which he has publicly taken credit in various contexts. These statements have already been included in ads, and Democrats plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to remind voters of that fact.

By supporting a 16-week ban, Trump would seek to appease both social conservatives who want to further restrict access to abortions and Republican and independent voters who want more modest restrictions on the procedure.

Abortion is currently banned before 16 weeks in 20 states, including Trump's home state of Florida. The kind of ban that Mr. Trump has privately discussed would restrict abortion rights in the remaining 30 states where it is legal as of then. And the issue of exceptions limited to the mother's life is also controversial. In Texas, state courts have ruled that women did not qualify for the limited exceptions for “life-threatening conditions” related to pregnancy, even in cases where their fetus was diagnosed with a serious condition and the woman's future fertility and health were at risk.

Aides to Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump, who described himself as a supporter of abortion rights for most of his adult life, announced in early 2011, as he was considering running for president in the Republican primaries, that he was now anti-abortion.

Yet Trump never seemed comfortable talking about it. In early 2016, Mr. Trump said in an interview with television host Chris Matthews that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who had illegal abortions, a comment his campaign quickly refuted.

At the time, Mr. Trump needed to convince skeptical social conservatives that he would implement anti-abortion policies and pick socially conservative judges, and he selected a deeply conservative vice president in Mike Pence to help with the persuasion effort.

Since then, Mr. Trump has made good on that and built a powerful bond with evangelical voters himself, feeling less of a need to pander to them. After Roe was overturned, Republicans have struggled to find ways to talk about abortion now that they can no longer simply say they oppose it. The concept of some kind of national ban has become a point of interest, with a 15-week federal abortion ban the foundation many anti-abortion activists have set for Republican candidates.

A 16-week ban wouldn't put an end to many abortions: Nearly 94 percent of abortions occur before 13 weeks of pregnancy, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control. Such a ban is also not based on medical research. Even 15 weeks falls before the point during a pregnancy when significant screenings take place to examine the fetus for rare – but potentially fatal – conditions. Instead, it has become a position that some Republicans, based on polling, believe will be most politically acceptable to voters.

A AP/NORC a poll released in July 2023, a year after Roe was overturned, found that a slim majority approved of a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The survey found that Democrats mainly supported such a measure and Republicans largely opposed it. A six-week ban scored poorly among a majority of Americans, including Republicans, while a majority of Americans were not in favor of allowing abortions up to 24 weeks' gestation, according to the survey.

One of Trump's allies, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, introduced legislation in 2022 calling for a 15-week abortion ban, with exceptions for rape, incest and the mother's life after that window closes.

Mr. Trump has never supported the bill, which other prominent Republicans distanced themselves from, and he said as recently as last fall that the decision should be left to the states. A leading anti-abortion group criticized him for that statement, but the leader was reassured after a meeting with Mr Trump and Mr Graham.

There are signs that embracing any form of national ban is unpopular with large swaths of independent voters and may be risky for Mr. Trump. In Virginia, for example, Gov. Glenn Youngkin's efforts to rally voters around what his campaign called a “15-week limit” last November failed, and Democrats exceeded expectations in the state's legislative elections.

So far in this Republican nominating contest, in which primary voters typically reward candidates for opposing abortion rights, Trump has avoided answering the question of whether he would support a national ban. Instead, he talks about abortion as if it were a real estate transaction. He has taken credit for giving anti-abortion activists “great bargaining power.”

“What's going to happen is you're going to think about a number of weeks or months,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on NBC's “Meet the Press” in September. “You're going to come up with a number that makes people happy.”

During a Fox News town hall event in January, a week before the Iowa caucuses, a socially conservative voter said asked Mr. Trump said he would “reassure me” that he would protect “every human being's right to life without compromise.”

Mr Trump refused to reassure her. “I love where you come from,” he told the voter. “But we still have to win elections. And they've used this – you know, we've got some great Republicans and they're great on this issue, and you would love them on this issue. And a lot of them were just decimated during the election.”

Trump even went so far as to criticize the six-week abortion ban signed by his former Republican rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “terrible.”

Mr. DeSantis tried to capitalize on the comment in socially conservative Iowa. “I don't know how you can even claim to be pro-life when you're criticizing states for putting in place protections for babies with a heartbeat,” he told Radio Iowa shortly after Mr. Trump made the comments in September. . “I think if he goes into this by saying he's going to make the Democrats happy on the right to life issue, I think all pro-lifers should know that he's preparing to sell you out.”

But conservative voters gave Trump a pass and an eventual victory by a record margin in Iowa.

Mr. Trump has been heartened by the lack of backlash and has privately gone even further by blaming more hardline Republicans for the party's election losses. He has repeatedly criticized two losing candidates for governor in 2022 — Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — for squandering winnable races by being too “right-wing” on abortion and not allowing enough exceptions.

Mr. Trump has told advisers and allies that he wants to try to make the issue of abortion positive by talking about what he characterizes as the “radical Democratic” position of supporting late-term abortions, which are rare but unpalatable to a large part of the population. significant number of Americans.

Lisa Lerer And Ruth Igielnik reporting contributed.