Insisting abortion rights should be left to state governments, Donald Trump nonetheless said the rightwing Arizona supreme court went too far when it ruled on Tuesday that a 160-year-old near-total ban could be enforced.
“Yeah, they did [go too far],” Trump said on Wednesday to reporters at an airport in Atlanta, Georgia. “That’ll be straightened out, and as you know it’s all about states’ rights.”
Only on Monday, a day before the Arizona court said the 1864 ban could go into effect, Trump issued a lengthy statement seeking to stake out his position on abortion rights.
Such rights should be a matter for state governments, he said, while refusing to back rightwing calls for a national ban, a stance which has angered some close allies.
Trump’s political opponents were swift to point out that he regularly boasts about being the architect of Dobbs v Jackson, the 2022 supreme court ruling in which three US supreme court justices he appointed voted to bring down Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which protected federal abortion rights.
Joe Biden and other Democrats repeatedly point to Trump’s role in making the Dobbs ruling possible, thereby triggering draconian state bans including the one in Arizona.
Elsewhere in his words with reporters on Wednesday, Trump said authorities in Arizona would “bring it back into reason and that it will be taken care of, I think, very quickly”.
Arizona is a swing state, key to the looming presidential and congressional elections. Though the Arizona supreme court is controlled by the right, the state’s governor, Katie Hobbs, and attorney general, Kris Mayes, are Democrats.
On Tuesday, Mayes decried “an existential crisis for our residents” and told NBC: “Millions of Arizonans – men and women, Republicans, Democrats, independents – woke up this morning to a decision that drags us back to 1864 … I have said I will not prosecute anyone under this draconian law.”
In Georgia, Trump claimed “it’s the will of the people” that abortion be left to the states. But national public opinion remains heavily in favour of abortion rights, a winning campaign issue for Democrats since federal rights were removed.
Since Dobbs, Democrats have enjoyed significant election wins while campaigning on abortion rights and ballot measures safeguarding such rights have been approved, even in Republican-run states. More such measures are due to be decided this year.
Leading Arizona Republicans including Kari Lake, a Trump-backed election denier now running for US Senate, backed away from the state supreme court decision.
On the national stage, Trump must walk a political tightrope, needing to satisfy hardline anti-abortion campaigners, dominant in his Republican base, while appealing to moderates and independents.
His personal views on the subject are a matter of constant speculation. In 2016, running for president and under fire for suggesting women who received abortions should be punished, he was asked by the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd if he had ever been involved with anyone who had an abortion.
“Such an interesting question,” Trump said. “So what’s your next question?”
Eight years on, in Georgia, Trump was asked if doctors should be punished for performing abortions.
“I’ll let that be to the states,” Trump said. “You know everything we’re doing now is states and states’ rights and what we wanted to do is get it back to the states because for 53 years [actually 51 since Roe] it’s been a fight and now the states are handling it and some have handled it very well and the others will end up handling it very well.”
Biden’s campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, issued a statement in response.
He said: “Donald Trump owns the suffering and chaos happening right now, including in Arizona, because he proudly overturned Roe – something he called ‘an incredible thing’ and ‘pretty amazing’ just today.
“Trump lies constantly – about everything – but has one track record: banning abortion every chance he gets. The guy who wants to be a dictator on day one will use every tool at his disposal to ban abortion nationwide, with or without Congress, and running away from reporters to his private jet like a coward doesn’t change that reality.”
Amid widespread incredulity and alarm over the Arizona supreme court decision, the Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson pointed out in her Letters from an American newsletter that the law concerned, which “will begin to be enforced in 14 days”, was “written by a single man in 1864”.
“In 1864,” Cox Richardson wrote, “Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases. And, of course, the United States was in the midst of the civil war.
“… The law that Arizona will use to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the civil war from inflicting damage on others – including pregnant women – rather than to police women’s reproductive care … Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control.”
