Social conservatives have from the outset of his campaign been suspicious of Donald Trump’s bona fides in matters of concern to them. But slowly, slowly, they’ve come to accept his candidacy, choosing to believe what he says now vs. what he said back a few months or years ago, although he can still make contradictory statements about his stance in the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence.
He will surely help consolidate some of that growing support with the appointment announced today of Marjorie Dannenfelser to be national chairwoman of his campaign’s Pro-life Coalition. Dannenfelser is president of the Susan B. Anthony List, the forced-birther group that trickily named itself after a feminist icon by inventing views she never publicly expressed.
Dannenfelser might seem an especially unusual choice for the post since she aligned herself in January during the primaries with a group of right-to-lifers arguing for “anybody but Donald Trump” who they viewed as unacceptable as a candidate. In addition to concerns about how he might affect their efforts to squelch legal abortion with what they view as iffy Supreme Court appointments and the like, the letter they signed noted that they were “disgusted” with his treatment of individual women, including Fox’s Megyn Kelly and candidate Carly Fiorina as well as his “exploitation of women in his Atlantic City casino hotel which boasted of the first strip club casino in the country.”
But that was during the primaries. That was then and this is now, and Trump is the GOP nominee no matter how much they might have preferred Ted Cruz in that slot.
In fact, Dannenfelser’s conversion appears to have begun last May when she effusively praised Trump for choosing outspoken forced-birther John Mashburn as his policy director in an earlier move to bring anti-abortion advocates into the fold.
In a letter sent to “pro-life leaders” today, Trump pledged his support on four issues: nominating “pro-life justices” to the U.S. Supreme Court; signing the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to end late-term abortions; defunding Planned Parenthood and sending their funding to “community health centers” for women; and “making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions.”
That’s much of what the forced birthers, Dannenfelser key among them, have been seeking.
But if Trump were to win the presidency he would face a reproductive rights movement re-energized by the recent Supreme Court rulings in the Hellerstedt case and other court actions favoring Planned Parenthood.
Most notable in this regard is the movement’s push to dump the Hyde Amendment entirely. That budget amendment—which bars federal dollars for abortions unless a woman’s health of life is at stake, or in cases of pregnancies that result from rape and incest—must be renewed each year as part of appropriations bills. A classist law that affects poor women the most, the amendment has been approved every year since 1976. For years, opposition to it has been desultory because it seems unbeatable. But African American women activists have recently spurred reproductive rights groups to take defeating it seriously.
That, of course, should happen even after Trump loses the election.