The GOP is starting a race to find out which state will be the first to use the 14th Amendment to ban abortion and see it legitimized by the Supreme Court.

After days of the GOP and the Trump campaign seeding stories of ~ discord ~ around the 2024 Republican Party’s abortion policy platform, we finally got a look at the actual language on Monday.

The platform reads:

We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe 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. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).

This has been cast in the Beltway, mainstream, and legacy press as the GOP “softening” its language on abortion, at the behest/thoughtful leadership of master machinator and ace negotiator Donald J. Trump, a thoughtful and moderate and very young and very mentally adept man known for his thoughtfulness and his moderation and his youth and mental acuity in all things, of which he is the final decider on because he is a big and very rich boy who cannot be bought, because he once fired people on a reality television game show.

Genuinely, the New York Times headline is: “Following Trump’s lead, Republicans adopt plan that softens stance on abortion.” The Times framing defined cascading coverage from the Washington Post to NBC to Politico to the Hill to CNN. (The AP opted away from “softened” and instead chose “scaled-down.”)

I gave the news cycle 24 hours to self-correct, but no dice: the day after the platform had been released, only The 19th had reported it accurately.

Far from “softening” on abortion, the GOP’s latest abortion policy platform, citing the 14th Amendment, is a brazen argument in favor of fetal personhood that manages, at the same time, to avoid the sticky technicality of literally saying the words “fetal personhood.”

Here’s the actual text of the 14th Amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The mainstream press has made much of the fact that the GOP platform excised past language calling for national bans and other abortion restrictions with this 14th Amendment paragraph.

As if literally printing fewer words means the platform has necessarily “softened.” Never mind what the words actually say.

It’s astounding that journalists, who write, speak, and edit for a living, don’t seem to understand this. Who needs plank after tiresome plank about banning and restricting abortion in eleventy specific ways if you can simply invoke the 14th Amendment in 90 words to assert that abortion is already banned under the Constitution? From there, you can expect that people who know what you mean (criminalize abortion by any means necessary) will get it. Then, all you need is for the Beltway press to sell your crafty copy-editing as “softening” on abortion and supporting IVF to the voters who everyone thinks are too dipshit to see what’s going on.

(And, honestly? I wonder if the Beltway press is that dipshit, because fetal personhood and “policies that advance” IVF actually are, really and truly, mutually exclusive.)

This is pretty important in an election year when voters are sort of touchy about abortion, seeing as how, again and again, voters have — literally every time they’ve been asked — cast their ballots in support of abortion rights.

Anyway, here’s my TikTok about it:

@_andreagrimes

stronger, not softer. Not even close. #greenscreen #repro #gop #election2024 #trump

♬ original sound – andrea grimes

If you can’t/won’t watch the TikTok, the tl;dr is: 14th Amendment arguments around abortion are fundamentally in support of fetal personhood, which is not a “states’ rights” issue, but a Constitutional assertion! The GOP is making a bald-faced claim that the Constitution already outlaws abortion at every stage of pregnancy. MSNBC columnist Sarah Posner went on a whole tear about this on Monday, and it’s worth appreciating her all-caps summary: “THE ABORTION PLANK IS A PERSONHOOD PLANK.”

The GOP and Trump put on a whole kayfabe/stage fight about disagreeing over the platform because they benefit from the American public believing (wrongly, as I laid out in the last abortion news roundup) that they’re battling it out to find a “moderate” or “compromise” position on abortion. They super the fuck are not!

But the Beltway press is determined to shove this narrative down our throats, anyway.

I genuinely do not know why or how the media-makers who are laundering the “softening” language missed the basic facts of the GOP’s 14th Amendment claim. You don’t need a law degree to understand it: the treatment of pregnancies (fetuses, zygotes, literally anything in the womb!) as persons deserving of constitutional protections requires that the government treat any pregnancy that doesn’t end in a live birth as a potential crime scene. Fetal personhood is a one-way road to criminalizing pregnancy loss, abortion, miscarriage, and/or fetal demise at any stage and under any circumstances.

I’m not going out on a limb here! This is the explicit and desired view of anti-abortion lobby groups, most notably the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025. If, somehow, you haven’t yet heard of Project 2025, Marisa Kabas sums it up thusly:

Project 2025 is conservatives’ vision for an American society that’s a result of gutting all the gains made by the civil rights, abortion rights, LGBTIA+ rights, voting rights and environmental rights movements in order to establish an authoritarian government run by loyalists committed to serving a white, Christian nationalist agenda.  

Here’s what Whole-Ass Human Thumb Thomas Jipping wrote about the 14th Amendment’s potential for outlawing abortion for the Heritage Foundation two years ago:

Since a sound case can be made that interpreting “person” to include all human beings is consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s original public meaning, Congress should do so for purposes of its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.

The ’24 GOP abortion platform asserts that the end of pregnancy at any stage is the end of a human life at every stage. And the implications will absolutely extend to pregnant people; the men writing these policies want to see people who have abortions jailed and prosecuted. Under the 14th Amendment.

That’s not softening. That’s strengthening.

Even worse: as Jamelle Bouie pointed out, this whole plank is a disgusting perversion of an amendment that exists as a corrective to the terrible legacy of chattel slavery.

There’s a reason Trump and the GOP were able to arrive at this “moderate” and “softened,” uh, “compromise” on abortion: because it’s nothing of the sort. It’s an explicit escalation of long-standing anti-abortion policy.

This is not a localized, limited concern of “red” states where abortion bans are in place. It’s not a matter of ensuring that pregnant people who live in “abortion-hostile” states can get to “blue” “abortion havens.” Do I have to point out that the 14th Amendment covers Oregon and Vermont and Illinois and New Mexico and, well, about 46 additional states? (We already know the “haven state” narrative is a farce. For example: California police are already sharing data about people who have abortions with anti-abortion states.)

If Donald Trump’s custom-appointed, 6-3 anti-abortion Supreme Court majority ever gets to weigh in on the 14th Amendment with regard to abortion, the Court will likely validate and legitimize those arguments. At that point, any anti-abortion activist who wants to challenge “blue” or “abortion-friendly” state abortion rights laws will get to fast-track that challenge through the federal judiciary — already stacked with anti-abortion jurists — straight up to an abortion-hostile SCOTUS.

This is not a “leave it to the states” situation.

The GOP is starting a race to find out which state will be the first to use the 14th Amendment to ban abortion and see it legitimized by the Supreme Court.

The GOP’s personhood plank on abortion is a threat to abortion nationwide, and an explicit call to criminalize people who have, support, and provide abortions.

It’s not about the actual 14th Amendment, the spirit and intent of that amendment, or actually treating the Constitution as an essential founding document to guide policy. It’s twisting the Constitution into knots in an attempt to legitimize outlawing abortion nationwide, against the will of the people. This what Republicans have been telling us they want, and what they intend to do, for decades. They’ve put it right there in the platform.

No moderation, no softening, no compromise.

Just bodily autonomy, criminalized.

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