LET’S PLAY HIDE-THE-PLATFORM
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The 2024 Republican National Committee’s new party platform is causing heartburn among some GOP veterans, because for the first time in four decades, the document makes no mention of a national abortion ban. Instead, the file reads as if Trump wrote it on his phone, using his Twitter-thumbs, at four in the morning, after downing a Panera Charged Lemonade. The document sets ludicrous goals, like “END INFLATION,” and, “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE.” It also says the party will oppose “Late Term Abortion,” without specifying what, exactly, that means. Some longtime anti-choice Republicans were dismayed by that vagueness about how, exactly, the party plans to take away people’s control over their own bodies, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who expressed “profound disappointment.”
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But reproductive rights advocates say this hardly amounts to a real shift for Trump and the GOP. After all, conservative Supreme Court justices repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022, despite calling it “settled as precedent” in confirmation hearings. “Unless Trump and his allies are planning to overturn the 21 state abortion bans they’re responsible for, this platform ‘change’ means nothing about the policies this party will pursue,” Jenny Lawson, the Planned Parenthood Votes executive director, said in a statement to What A Day. “The GOP’s platform is as untrustworthy as the presidential candidate they’re backing.”
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The phrase “Late Term Abortion” itself is totally vague. The term “has no medical meaning,“ Shefali Luthra, a reproductive health reporter for The 19th News, told Wednesday’s What A Day podcast. When used by Republicans, Luthra added, this phrase can be “slippery;” to one Republican it could mean an abortion at 20 weeks, and to another, it might mean 12 weeks.
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The platform’s reference to the 14th amendment, which provides equal protection under the law, is more insidious, Luthra pointed out. The use of this phrase is “a real telegraph to abortion opponents,” who have latched onto the amendment as a subversive vehicle to potentially ban abortion nationwide — or perhaps even IVF, because of a theory called “fetal personhood” that could be used to block abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
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