During the second presidential debate of the 2024 election but the first ever between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the former Republican president flipped the script both on the moderators who were challenging his opposition to federal abortion restrictions and on the vice president’s current support for codifying unfettered abortion access nationwide.
“You should ask, will she allow abortion in the eighth month, ninth month, seventh month, okay, would you do that?” Trump said, suggesting the moderators press Harris on her own position. “Why don’t you ask questions? You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month, and probably after birth.”
Referring to remarks by Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic governor of Virginia, Trump also pointed to past opposition from the party to partial-birth abortion bans that would prevent physicians from being legally required to provide life-saving care to infants accidentally born alive during abortions.
Despite Harris’s embrace of the abortion issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, Trump’s explicit abortion position is far closer to the national average than that of Harris.
Both as senator and vice president, Harris has endorsed legislation that would federally codify legal abortion up until the point of birth with the Women’s Health Protection Act. But while the overwhelming majority of the country believes abortion should be legal in the early stages of a pregnancy, public opinion dramatically shifts throughout the gestation of a pregnancy and opposite Harris’s preferences. Gallup found last year that little more than a third of all voters support legal abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy, and barely one in five voters supports protecting abortion access in the third trimester, with 70% saying late-term abortion should be illegal, contra Harris’s previously stated position.
By contrast, Trump has fully taken abortion off the table as a federal issue, incurring friendly fire from social conservatives thanks to the promise of running mate J.D. Vance to veto any federal bill restricting abortion at all. Trump has criticized Florida’s six-week ban, which is opposed by 59% of voters polled by Gallup, but he also announced his opposition to the Sunshine State’s Amendment 4, which would legalize those wildly unpopular late-term abortions.
One gets the sense that Trump agrees with that median public opinion that Democrats once pretended to endorse: that abortion, far from being an affirmative good, should be safe, term-limited, and rare when legalized at the state level. Trump correctly noted that neither Republicans nor Democrats will come close to achieving the 60-seat majority required to pass abortion restrictions, which the Supreme Court majority seems to indicate is a right reserved to the states to regulate anyway.