Trump Made a Freudian Slip About Abortion. You Probably Missed It.
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This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“We’re, like, the party of fertilization because we are for the women.” —Donald Trump, speaking about abortion following a rally in Michigan earlier this month
Over the past week, Trump has been all over the headlines, between Stormy Daniels’ testimony in his hush money trial and the news that Trump’s mysterious, yearslong IRS audit could result in his owing $100 million in back taxes. But the Trump news I can’t stop thinking about is a baffling—and accidentally quite telling—interview the former president gave to a local news station about reproductive rights. It was mostly a bunch of word vomit that got very little attention, but it contained a damning Freudian slip that encapsulates the party’s views on abortion and what rights, if any, should be afforded to women.
Following a rally in Saginaw County, a Fox 2 Detroit anchor asked Trump how abortion would affect the November election. Trump, regurgitating some of his favorite lines of late, claimed that all legal scholars wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—a feat he managed to achieve. Now that abortion is a state issue, he said, “it’s working out” and “people are satisfied with it.” (Trump also seemed not to know that Michigan voters already passed a ballot measure to protect abortion.) This is all a bunch of nonsense, but it’s not the part that’s stuck with me.
Trump then appeared to reference the Alabama Supreme Court ruling declaring that embryos created for in vitro fertilization were legally human beings under wrongful-death statutes. The February decision halted IVF treatments in the state and sent GOP members of Congress into a tailspin about whether they support the fertility treatment’s legality. (Shocker: They blocked a Senate bill that would have protected it.) In the interview, Trump tried to claim that the GOP supports IVF more than Democrats do, and made a glaring slip-up (starting around 6:30 into this clip):
We’re, like, the party of fertilization because we are for the women. We wanna help the women. Because they were gonna end fertilization, which is where the IVF—where women go to the clinics and they get help in having a baby, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And we’re for it 100 percent. [Democrats] tried to say that [Republicans] weren’t for it. They actually weren’t for it and aren’t for it as much as us, but women see that.
Trump saying that Republicans are “the party of fertilization” is inadvertently one of the most honest things he’s ever said about abortion. He can swear up and down that he believes it’s now an issue for the states, but anti-abortion activists and the current GOP have been extremely clear that their end goal is full legal rights for fertilized eggs—rights that necessarily come at the expense of the living, breathing people with said eggs inside them.
A month after the Alabama IVF dust-up, the influential Republican Study Committee endorsed the Life at Conception Act, a House bill that would give embryos legal rights from “the moment of fertilization.” If that fetal personhood bill became law, it would not only nationalize the Alabama Supreme Court decision—it would also ban abortion in all 50 states. The RSC comprises nearly 80 percent of House Republicans. Days after that bill endorsement, Alliance Defending Freedom CEO Kristen Waggoner told Politico that the legal juggernaut hopes to one day get the Supreme Court to uphold a federal abortion ban based on personhood: “We do believe at ADF that the Constitution protects the life of an unborn child and that that is in the 14th Amendment.” The ADF helped write the Mississippi law the court used to overturn Roe and ostensibly send abortion back to the states, but it’s not stopping there.
Another ADF case horrifically illustrates what it means to be the party of fertilization—and how legal rights during pregnancy can become a zero-sum game. In Moyle v. United States, the legal advocacy group is helping Idaho defend its near-total abortion ban, which has exceptions only to prevent death, not threats to health. The Biden administration says the ban conflicts with a federal law that requires hospitals to stabilize all emergency room patients whose health or organ function is in jeopardy, even if that care is abortion. Idaho’s argument was, essentially, that a miscarrying woman on the verge of losing her uterus may not be entitled to an abortion because the state has acted to protect fetal life—even though, in many of these cases, the fetus won’t survive. Responding to hypotheticals from Justice Elena Kagan, Idaho’s lawyer said, “There are two patients to consider in those circumstances,” and “the two-patient scenario is tough.” (If the justices side against the Biden administration, it could mean that pregnant women in Idaho and other states with abortion bans will face dangerous discrimination in ERs.)
Trump’s “fertilization” interview reminded me of another recent pile of abortion gibberish that contained a kernel of honesty: his early April video on Truth Social in which he claimed he wants to leave abortion to the states but that the issue isn’t as important as winning in November. He previewed his video by saying that Republicans “have an obligation to the salvation of our Nation … TO WIN ELECTIONS.” He reiterated this sentiment on camera: “You must follow your heart on this issue. But remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country.”
Trump implying that he can’t endorse a national ban now because it’s so unpopular is the most believable thing he said. It was also a wink and a nod to conservatives that he’s doing what it takes to regain power: They can simply revisit the issue later. And we know exactly what they’ll do.
