Top Republican On Platform Writing Committee Gives The Game Away On Abortion

Last updated: 2024/07/16 at 11:49 PM

Now that pillars of the Republican Party platform have been officially adopted, one of the leaders of the committee that wrote it has let it spill that the party’s supposed softening on abortion that many reported on last week is (as we and a handful of other outlets suggested at the time) not exactly accurate.

As TPM noted last week, at first glance, the proposed policy platform on abortion appeared to drop the Republican Party’s longtime interest in giving more rights to embryos and fetuses under the law.

“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,” a final draft version of the document distributed last week read. “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).”

TPM and others noted that the ambiguity of the language of the proposed policy could lead some to interpret the proposal as calling for states to pass laws that would provide “due process” protections for fetuses. That would place the abortion plank of the 2024 platform pretty firmly in the camp of fetal personhood ideology that the Republican Party not only has supported for decades but also that has been recently used to ban abortion and put in-vitro fertilization access in harms way in at least one state.

Now that the platform has been adopted by the party at the Republican National Convention, during its kick-off day Monday, a top official on the writing panel has let the cat out of the bag a bit. Ed Martin — president of the conservative group the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles and one of the people the Trump campaign and the RNC put on the platform-writing committee — made some remarks on his radio show, Pro-America Report, Tuesday decoding the supposedly “softened” anti-abortion language.

“It’s got protections for pro-life. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s not protections for pro-life,” Martin said, as first noted by Mother Jones. “There’s not as many words describing it, but there’s protection under the Constitution, that life is protected.”

The remarks appear to suggest that the language of the platform would allow for 2024 Republicans to embrace a federal abortion ban, without saying that explicitly.