It’s easy to conflate reasonability with popularity. President Donald Trump benefits from this notion, especially among conservatives, and more especially among pro-lifers.
That becomes obvious in abortion pill disputes, wherein most people end up approving of it and the media continue to lie about its safety. The shock factor of these results seems never to diminish. Newly, the Trump administration requested that a federal judge dismiss a lawsuit from Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri aimed at restricting access to mifepristone. Department of Justice attorneys reportedly argued that the states’ claims “have no connection to the Northern District of Texas,” where the original lawsuit is pending, and so “cannot proceed in this Court.”
Trump has made claims of being the “most pro-life president ever,” and in some ways, it holds up. The pro-life movement has been hopeful since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, accomplished in large part by the help of Trump’s Supreme Court influence. And despite a growing impression to the contrary, that hopefulness is kept alive by such outcomes as Planned Parenthood’s closing branches after a funding freeze from Trump.
But pro-lifers cannot count on him. They know as much — many count instead on the social conservatives who fill the administration and operate under Trump’s name. The President, however, proves himself willful. If he did not seem so during the first term, Trump continues to come off risk inclined and unrestrained. As such, his intervention in the current abortion pill matter is sorely discouraging. Not because it is conclusive, but because it is confusing: Trump has had no problem stretching the limits of the courts (as with deportations) and the preferences of the people (as with tariffs).
Then again, not so confusing: It is no mystery that Trump plays to people more than to evidence. A new, largest-ever study of the abortion pill has found the drug’s likelihood of adverse events, apart from the as-designed death of the child, to be 22 times higher than the Food and Drug Administration reports. The study has received little coverage despite its significant implications on the legality and advisability of the abortion pill. Were Trump to back the FDA’s current procedures, such as allowing the pill to be sent by mail, his stance would come as no surprise — public opinion downplays and accepts chemical abortion, mostly because of how disconnected it permits one to be from the gravity of the act.
PRONATALIST COMPROMISES ARE DOOMED TO FAIL
But such consensus is debatable when the matter agreed-upon is inconceivable to the observer. So it is with the pro-life perspective: One recent study in public opinion indicated that “pro-life people significantly overestimated the share of their fellow Americans who shared their worldview.”
All this means is that pro-lifers attuned to Trump’s political style are overly optimistic — and maybe don’t realize it. But maybe Trump’s implicit defense of Biden-era COVID rules isn’t as bad as we think. Maybe we can hope he’s setting up a better way to attack the abortion pill. There is no real way to know, is there?