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How Trump And The GOP Will Effectively Ban Abortion Nationwide [1]

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Date: 2024-10-04  

The Trump campaign used Melania Trump to make news this week, as she for the first time claimed she supports abortion rights. Convenient political timing? Of course. Reason to believe her? Who knows. There’s no reason to believe someone like Melania Trump one way or the other. What we can almost certainly believe is that Trump himself also supports abortion rights, if and when he needs them to cover up one of his affairs or relieve himself of the financial obligation that having more children would have entailed. Trump has no true beliefs himself, other than what will benefit himself in the moment. But one thing we do know about Trump is that his only compass at this point in his life is revenge and an obsession with causing harm to those who dare oppose him — ie most Americans. So while he may claim he’ll veto a nationwide abortion ban, anyone who would risk the life of their daughter, daughter in law, wife, girlfriend, etc. on a promise from Donald Trump is making a big big mistake.

But here’s the trick, and you can bet Trump and the GOP know this and it’s why Trump is framing his veto claim the way he is. A straightforward nationwide ban via Congressional action is not likely to be the way that Republicans will attempt to effectively ban abortion in our country, even in blue states. It would be too politically risky and the fallout would likely lose them a lot of seats in Congress.

experts don’t consider that the most likely way a national abortion ban could come about, for two reasons: polling shows it would be extremely unpopular, and it would require the elimination of the Senate filibuster. Instead, they point to a different branch of the federal government — the president’s office and all the federal agencies it oversees. In the federal agencies, opponents of abortion could fashion a de facto abortion ban by chipping away at abortion access in numerous ways; for example, limiting access to medication abortion, which now constitutes nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. The biggest way that the president’s office could limit abortion is by deciding to enforce something called the Comstock Act: a 150-year-old abortion ban made obsolete by Roe v. Wade but possibly revived by its repeal. The final way the next president could determine the future of abortion rights is through federal court appointments. The anti-abortion movement’s “next Roe v. Wade” is the national legal recognition of fetal personhood, an idea that would by definition outlaw all abortion. The current Supreme Court isn’t yet right-wing enough to endorse this idea. But after another Trump term, that could change.

We’re already seeing this in the states. For example, you can bet that this new law in Lousiana is something the GOP and the Supreme Court will attempt nationwide as soon as they’re able. And it’ll just be an opening salvo to much worse restrictions:

And here’s another thing. While Trump may have relied on abortion in the past to hide his affairs or to simply retain his freedom from the financial burden of all of the children he would have otherwise had with many various women, he has no intention of allowing men going forward to have that kind of freedom for themselves. Because abortion rights don’t just impact women. Even just from a selfish standpoint, men should also prepare themselves for a new reality where the radical Christian right will require them to financially support all of the children their girlfriends or even their one night stands must now give birth to. This will cut short the ability for many young men to attend college, for example. Also, men who have been involved with an abortion also earn more on average than men who’s “partners” ended up giving birth, even when those men aren’t living with the mother and child. Men seem to not be considering the impact that a de facto nationwide ban will have on them if their support for Trump is any signal.

young men who were involved with a pregnancy and whose partners had an abortion were nearly four times more likely to graduate from college than those whose partners gave birth. Her research also suggests that males under the age of 20 who were affected by an abortion were likely to earn more money than those who became parents but did not live with their child.

When Trump says he’ll veto a national abortion ban, don’t fall for it. It’s a semantic trick. That isn’t the route that Republicans are planning on taking to make it impossible to get lifesaving treatment or even just a routine abortion in the blue states. It would be political suicide for them to attempt a nationwide ban via Congress. But they already have their plans for an effective nationwide ban tee’d up and ready to go. If Trump wins the election, we’ll see them implement those in the coming years. You can be sure of it. Every voter should prepare themselves for losing the effective right to an abortion in America if power is given back to Trump. All he wants is to punish the liberals and women that he knows it will enrage. That’s all he believes in. Vengeance is all that’s left in his soul and among his base.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/4/2274768/-How-Trump-And-The-GOP-Will-Effectively-Ban-Abortion-Nationwide?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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