In the opening rounds of the presidential debates, pro-life campaigners found no champion in former President Trump. He would not ban abortion medications, which are responsible, the CNN moderators said, for two-thirds of abortions in the United States. And he framed his appointment of Supreme Court justices leading to the overturning of Row v Wade as a need to return decisions about abortion laws to the states rather than a move against abortion itself.
In this presidential campaign, there is no pro-life candidate.
This brings us to the outcome of Presidential Trump Mark 1, who achieved office with eighty per cent of the white evangelical vote largely on campaigning to overturn Roe v Wade and remove the Supreme Court ruling of a right to abortion.
The inconvenient truth is that in the wake of overturning Row v Wade in the Dobbs case, there has been an increase, not a decrease, in the number of abortions in the US.
The number of clinician-provided abortions in the United States rose by
more than 100,000 between 2020 and 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion body that is regarded as a reliable source of abortion statistics.
“An estimated 1,037,000 abortions were provided by clinicians in states without total bans in 2023, an increase of 11% from 2020, when the total was 930,160.1 These counts do not include self-managed abortions, such as those obtained using abortion pills mailed from pharmacies outside the United States. Evidence suggests self-managed abortions have increased since Dobbs.
The increase in clinician abortions has occurred despite fourteen states imposing total abortion bans in effect as of March 2024 (which meant all abortion clinics in those states had been closed. These states had 63 clinics in 2020.
“The total number of provisions of medications for self-managed abortion increased by an estimated 27 838 in the 6 months after Dobbs (July-December 2022) vs what would have been expected based on pre-Dobbs levels,” according to a study reported in the March 2024 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Conservatives have suggested that the Comstock Act of 1873, which criminalises an act by a common carrier, including the United States Postage Service, in conveying obscene matter, including abortion material, could be used to restrict the supply of Abortion drugs. But following his comments in the debate Trump has come out against a ban.
An attempt to have abortion drugs restricted, alleging that the federal health authorities have improperly permitted their use, backed by the Christian lobby group Alliance Defending Freedom was rejected by the US Supreme Court https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2qq1wqw3w2o last month.
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