No One Wanted This

Trump claims ending Roe is what we all "wanted."

“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Justice Alito wrote in 2022 when six Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade and revoked women’s rights to control their own bodies.

In a concurrence designed to paint a gentler face on Alito’s nasty triumphalism, Justice Kavanaugh congratulated the Court for taking a “scrupulously neutral” position and protecting democracy by returning the issue of abortion “to the states.”

“After today’s decision, the nine Members of this Court will no longer decide the basic legality of pre-viability abortion for all 330 million Americans,” he smarmed. “That issue will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the States or Congress.

The court’s three liberal justices flamed Kavanaugh for affecting to promote liberty while drastically curtailing it.

“[W]ould he say that the Court is being ‘scrupulously neutral’ if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want?” they demanded in dissent. “What, then, of the right to contraception or same-sex marriage? Would it be ‘scrupulously neutral’ for the Court to eliminate those rights too? The point of all these examples is that when it comes to rights, the Court does not act ‘neutrally’ when it leaves everything up to the States. Rather, the Court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers.”

Sending abortion “back to the states” has proved wildly unpopular, particularly as conservative legislatures passed draconian bans with criminal penalties for health care providers. These laws are an albatross around the neck of every Republican who hopes to carry a swing state, and none more than the presidential candidate who appointed the three Supreme Court justices who made it happen. And so, when asked about it during last week’s debate, Trump adopted Kavanaugh’s supposedly democratic justification.

Well, first he told a pile of abject lies about Democrats murdering newborns and along the way managed to confused Virginia and West Virginia. But then he came to the point.

“What I did is something for 52 years they've been trying to get Roe v. Wade into the states. And through the genius and heart and strength of six supreme court justices we were able to do that,” he babbled. “And now states are voting on it.”

Who is “they” in this fantasyland?

“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote. And that's what happened,” he continued with the confidence of a born liar, unburdened by what has been, or even objective reality.

Zero Democrats wanted to send the issue of women’s bodily autonomy “back to the states.” No liberal legal scholars hoped that Roe would be overturned so that red states could ban abortion at will, and not even Kavanaugh was disingenuous enough to suggest that they did. He said that the Court was wrong when it held in Roe that the Fourteenth Amendment’s right to privacy encompassed the right to an abortion, and he suggested that the persistence of debate meant that it should go back to the states instead of being treated as an issue of settled law.

Vice President Harris’s response in Philadelphia was one of her best moments of the evening.

“Let's understand how we got here,” she shot back. “Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. And they did exactly as he intended.”

She decried the proliferation of “Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care,” and then laid out exactly what that means on the ground for women and families.

You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she's bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? 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.

She deftly skewered Trump’s offensive lies about palliative care for dying newborns, something he calls allowing doctors to “execute the baby.”

“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That is not happening,” she said indignantly, noting that, in reality, American women are being denied medical care because of the decision “everyone wanted.”

What is happening in our country, working people, working women who are working one or two jobs, who can barely afford childcare as it is, have to travel to another state to get on a plane sitting next to strangers, to go and get the health care she needs. Barely can afford to do it. And what you are putting her through is unconscionable.

Republicans today are fighting tooth and nail to ensure that women don’t get what they “want.” From Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton went all the way to the state’s Supreme Court to ensure that a woman carrying a dying baby was denied the care she needed to protect her future fertility, to Idaho, where women are being airlifted to Oregon with life-threatening emergencies, women in red states are physically endangered by lack of access to healthcare post-Roe.

“That is immoral,” Harris continued. “And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”

Then she hammered the point that not even Republicans “wanted” to leave the issue of abortion up to “the people” or “the states.”

“If Donald Trump were to be re-elected, he will sign a national abortion ban,” she pressed. “Understand in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.”

Trump shouted that he would not sign a ban, but refused to commit to veto one because Congress is so divided that “I won't have to.” This cut the knees out from under his own running mate, who had just pissed off evangelicals by telling NBC’s Kristen Welker “he said explicitly that he would” veto a ban should one come before him. But Trump can’t afford to lose a single religious conservative, so Senator Vance will have to hobble along.

In fact, the GOP has long advocated a nationwide ban on abortion, only removing it from the party platform this summer at the insistence of the former president, who knows the issue is a loser. Both Alito and Kavanaugh acknowledged that “the people’s elected representatives” and “Congress” would have a role to play in crafting national abortion policy. And just six months later, 131 House Republicans co-sponsored HR 431, the “Life Begins at Conception” Act, which would ban abortion nationwide with no exceptions for rape, incest, or to protect a pregnant person’s life or health.

That bill never got a hearing, but not because conservatives decided that this was an issue better left to the states. Rather, they know that it’s politically toxic, and so, when Senator Lindsey Graham came out in favor of a nationwide 15-week abortion ban, they told him to shut up and stop endangering their electoral prospects.

But Project 2025, the manifesto drafted by upwards of 100 alums of the first Trump administration and which bills itself the “presidential transition project,” does indeed plan for an anti-abortion czar “with the rank of Special Assistant to the President or higher” to oversee “abortion surveillance” and “ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

The Project 2025 guys are very clear that they never “wanted” to leave the issue of abortion up to the states, writing, “The next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”

And not for nothing, but Republicans are trying desperately to keep abortion off the ballot, since voters everywhere are saying loud and clear that they don’t “want” to criminalize women’s healthcare.

In short, no one wanted to let the states decide this piecemeal. Not Democrats. Not scholars. And certainly not Republicans, who intend to ban abortion coast to coast, irrespective of the will of American electorate.

“We did something that everybody said couldn't be done. And now you have a vote of the people on abortion,” Trump rambled, admitting that, at the end of the day, he does own the issue.

Luckily, in November, we get that “vote of the the people on abortion.” Let’s make sure to let him know what we didn’t “want” this, and we have no intention of putting up with it.