Throughout his 2024 campaign for president, Donald Trump has avoided giving straight, consistent or accurate answers to questions about abortion – and in his first debate appearance against Kamala Harris, Trump kept up that streak.
Moderators introduced abortion, one of the biggest issues in the election, by asking about the most recent example of Trump’s incoherence on the topic: his position on a Florida ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution. Over the last few weeks, Trump initially suggested that he would vote in favor of the measure – which would restore abortion rights in a state that has banned the procedure past six weeks of pregnancy – before quickly backtracking amid outrage from his anti-abortion base.
Asked to explain his flip-flop, Trump said: “The reason I’m doing that vote – because the plan is – you know the vote is – they have abortion in the ninth month.”
Less than a fraction of a percentage point of abortions take place after the 21st week of pregnancy. Executing a baby after birth, which Trump repeatedly accused Democrats of supporting, would be infanticide and it is illegal in all 50 states – as noted by the ABC News moderator Linsey Davis in a fact-check after he spoke.
When pressed on abortion, Trump has long pivoted to making outlandish claims about killing babies. In his final debate against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, he claimed that “you can rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day”. That kind of gruesome rhetoric proved useful for Trump at the time, as leaders of the anti-abortion movement cheered him on and ultimately helped put him in the White House.
In a post-Roe nation where most people support abortion rights, however, that rhetoric hits differently.
“The accusations of extremism are a lot less effective when your own party is aligned with the movement that most Americans are perceiving as extreme,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies the legal history of reproduction.
Trump also claimed that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, every liberal, conservative – they all wanted this issue to be brought back to these states”. In reality, more than 60% of Americans disapproved of the decision to overturn Roe. Support for abortion rights has surged since Roe’s demise, including in red states.
For Harris, meanwhile, the topic of abortion yielded some of her strongest moments in a debate already full of strong moments. She spoke passionately about women bleeding out from miscarriages unable to get care, victims of rape forced to carry unwanted pregnancies. Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster, saw Harris’s comments on abortion as the moment the debate snapped into place for the vice-president.
“The opening was a little more mixed,” Lake said. “I think Trump made a strong case on the economy but she just knocked it out of the park on the abortion stuff.”
During her turn to speak, Harris appeared to reference the case of Jaci Statton, a woman who was told by Oklahoma hospital staffers that they could not end her nonviable pregnancy and to instead wait in a hospital parking lot until she was “crashing”.
“She’s bleeding out in the car in the parking lot,” Harris said. “She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”
Tresa Undem, who’s been polling people on abortion for decades, thought the way Harris talked about abortion was “unprecedented”.
“For undecided women and undecided independent men, I think it was pretty powerful and it can have an effect,” Undem said. “She reminded folks, including undecided voters, that most Americans are with her. Most Americans believe that women should have control over their own body … And she landed on freedom, which is a value that everybody cares about.”
Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly ducked efforts to commit to vetoing a national abortion ban and baldly rejected comments made by JD Vance, his running mate, who said that Trump would veto such a ban.
“Well, I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness,” Trump said.
Harris, too, was evasive in moments – when asked directly if she would support any restrictions on abortion, she reiterated her longstanding promise to support legislation to codify Roe into law, even though Roe didn’t stop states from enacting the restrictions that hacked away at access to the procedure. (It is also unlikely that Congress would pass such a bill anytime soon.) In an interview after the debate, Harris’s pick for vice-president, Tim Walz, also dodged questions about restrictions his boss may support.
In the weeks since Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, abortion has become an increasingly key issue for women. A recent New York Times poll found that, among all women, it now rivals the economy in terms of importance and is the top voting issue among women under 45. A Harris campaign representative told Rolling Stone that in the first hour of the debate, 71% of grassroots donors to the campaign were women.
“I think she litigated it just spectacularly well,” Lake said. “Two-thirds of the impact of the debate are the press interpretations afterward and the press has been even more positive. When you have Fox News criticizing Trump and saying there should be another debate, you know you’ve won.”
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