“Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that will happen, and it will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court,” Trump said. “I will say this, it will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.”

But abortions are up slightly since Roe fell in 2022, hitting 1,126,000 clinician-provided abortions last year, according to data compiled by the pro-legal abortion Guttmacher Institute. That’s still well below the peak of 1.6 million abortions in 1990, but it is a break from the trend of declining abortions from much of the 1990s to 2009 — and exactly the opposite of what pro-life activists expected from the reversal of the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in most cases throughout the country.

One reason that abortions haven’t continued falling despite the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision allowing states to ban the procedure is that the continued availability of mail-order abortion pills has allowed women seeking abortions to circumvent pro-life laws in states where they are on the books. (Some states responded to Dobbs by liberalizing their abortion laws further or enshrining legal abortion in their state constitutions.)

The second Trump administration has allowed continued access to mail-order abortion pills while swearing off new federal abortion restrictions and slow-walking a safety review of mifepristone by the Food and Drug Administration. One pro-life leader who had previously tried to maintain cordial relations with Trump and a place at the table in the White House is more blunt about the issue.

“Trump is the problem,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal in an article published on May 3. “The president is the problem.”

That’s a jarring quote. Pro-life activists worked hard to return Trump to the White House in the 2024 election campaign. He had been an architect of the anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court, delivering what previous Republican presidents could not. According to exit polls, Trump won 92% of voters who thought abortion should be illegal in most cases and 88% who believed it should be illegal in all cases. Asked simply whether or not abortion should be legal, Trump carried 91% of those who said the practice should be illegal.

But Trump also won 29% of voters who said abortion should be legal. He tied former Vice President Kamala Harris, 49% to 49%, on a more detailed question asking voters if abortion should be legal in most cases. He barely lost to her on the question of who voters trusted more to handle abortion, receiving 46% to Harris’s 49%.

Trump had skillfully navigated the complexities of public opinion on abortion in the first presidential election since Roe was overturned while running against only the second female major-party nominee. (He had previously beaten the first woman nominee, but that was while Roe remained in effect.) He did so by running to the right of the Democrats but to the left of the mainstream pro-life movement.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. While Trump was willing to take credit for ending Roe and fulfilling his 2016 campaign promise to nominate conservative judges, he was also quick to recognize the electoral risks that returning abortion policy to the democratically elected branches of government posed to Republicans.

Throughout the run-up to the 2024 Republican primaries and during the election, Trump repeatedly warned the party that abortion was going to be a difficult issue. Democrats, Trump told a GOP fundraising dinner in South Carolina that year, “have energized this issue and the Republicans are going to have to learn how to fight it.”

“I have to tell you from a conservative and Republican standpoint, you have to learn how to talk about pro-life, you have to learn how to talk about that decision,” Trump said at another GOP fundraising event in Alabama. “Because you don’t know how to talk about it.”

“In order to win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to properly talk about abortion,” Trump said at a rally in Dubuque later that year.

Trump’s advice was to position the Democrats as the extremists on abortion. “Remember, the Democrats are the radicals on this issue. We’re not the radicals on this issue,” he said. “The Democrats are the radicals because they’re willing to kill babies in their fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth month and even after birth.”

Trump then invoked former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, whom he called “that wack job who thought he was Michael Jackson.” In 2019, Northam spoke on an area radio station during a dispute over late-term abortion in Virginia, saying, “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

In the primaries, Trump hit Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for signing what he deemed an overly strict abortion ban, calling the “heartbeat” bill a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley tried to capitalize on Trump’s abortion triangulation, but were unsuccessful.

After Trump won the nomination for the third consecutive time, he weakened the Republican platform planks on abortion and marriage, having left them largely intact during his first two presidential runs. The GOP platform, as adopted in Milwaukee, endorsed Trump’s federalist approach of leaving abortion regulations largely to the states.

When Trump does engage on abortion from a pro-life perspective, he doesn’t mince words or retreat to euphemisms about creating a culture of life. He describes abortion, especially late-term abortions, as killing babies.

“If you go with what Hillary is saying,” Trump said in a 2016 debate with Clinton, “in the ninth month you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother, just prior to the birth of the baby.”

“Now, you can say that that’s okay,” Trump continued. “And Hillary can say that’s okay. But it’s not okay with me. Because based on what she’s saying and based on where she’s going and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”

But like most issues, Trump also talks about abortion as something that can be negotiated. “Pro-lifers have a tremendous power now with that termination [of Roe] to negotiate. They had none,” Trump told Alabama Republicans. “They didn’t have any before that ruling. They had no power whatsoever, [people] could kill babies at any time they wanted, including after what we would call birth. They could kill babies. Now [pro-lifers] have tremendous power.”

Trump made a similar argument in an interview that year. “But on pro-life, I will tell you what I did on Roe v. Wade, nobody else, for 50 years they’ve been trying to do it. I got it done,” he said. “And now we’re in a position to make a really great deal and a deal that people want.”

“We’re in a position now — and I’m going to be leading the charge — we’re in the position now where we can get something that the whole country can agree with, and that’s only because I got us out of the Roe v. Wade, where the pro-life people had absolutely nothing to say,” Trump said.

“We’re going to agree to a number of weeks or months, or however you want to define it,” Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press, the same show on which he originally said he was “pro-choice” in 1999, causing pro-lifers to initially view his first Republican presidential campaign with suspicion.

But even on the narrow question of in vitro fertilization, Trump has learned that such deal-making on moral issues is easier said than done.

Trump’s May IVF announcement at the White House was an olive branch to the pro-life movement. But most antiabortion activists believe the embryo destruction involved in the practice is immoral. Universal IVF coverage proponents were also unhappy with Trump’s proposal, which included concessions to pro-lifers who didn’t want to see paying for IVF mandated under Obamacare.

Trump’s team has taken other steps to make things right with pro-lifers. There have been meetings at the White House. Marty Makary, who was also unpopular with the pharmaceutical industry, has been ousted at the FDA.

“Dr. Makary was uniquely destructive to the pro-life movement,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said after the FDA chief stepped down under pressure. “His resignation is an opportunity for the FDA to reset.”

A larger problem, however, isn’t Trump. Now that Republicans can actually follow through on the things they have long said they wanted to do about abortion, the political risks are greater. 

A May 5 YouGov poll found that 48% support making abortion pills available by mail, “even if they are accessible in states with abortion restrictions,” compared to 27% who are opposed. Forty-seven percent say medical abortions are safe, to 21% who believe it is unsafe, and 33% who aren’t sure.

In Gallup’s polling, public identification with the pro-life position peaked at 51% in 2009 and fell as low as 39% in the weeks before the Dobbs decision (which was leaked early) in May 2022. The split in 2025 was 51% pro-choice to 43% to pro-life. Last year, 35% said abortion should be legal only under a few circumstances, 30% said abortion should be legal under all circumstances, 19% said it should be legal in most cases, and 13% said it should be illegal in all cases. (These numbers fluctuate less historically than the pro-choice vs. pro-life split.)

Democrats have taken to describing virtually any pro-life law passed at the federal level as a “national abortion ban.” Trump, during the 2024 campaign, fought hard to prevent this branding from sticking to Republicans, emphasizing repeatedly that he was going to leave abortion up to the states.

When the Supreme Court heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, many thought Roe would be overturned then. Abortion rights activists feared Justice Clarence Thomas, who was narrowly confirmed after a bitter fight in 1991, would be the fifth vote against Roe after nearly a dozen years of Republican presidents.

Instead, three Reagan appointees and one justice nominated by George H.W. Bush voted with the liberals to uphold the essence of Roe. Pro-lifers were bitterly disappointed. But Casey did expand the range of abortion restrictions that were permissible under the court’s jurisprudence. This largely shifted the abortion debate in the pro-life movement’s favor, with a focus on parental-notification laws, bans on late-term abortions, and particularly grisly procedures like partial-birth abortion, and restrictions on taxpayer funding of abortion.

Thirty years later, Dobbs was the legal victory the pro-life movement hoped for since 1973. Not a single one of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court let them down. Trump kept his word that Roe would be overturned if he could appoint “two or three” justices.

But by allowing pro-life elected officials to regulate abortion in ways that weren’t as popular as banning partial-birth abortion, Dobbs may have shifted the political debate back in favor of the pro-choice side. Democrats used abortion to minimize their losses in the 2022 midterm elections, though Republicans still won control of the House.

Pro-lifers suffered losses in ballot initiatives not just in reliably blue states, but also in more favorable terrain like Ohio and Kansas. Abortions stopped declining and started rising again. The movement had managed to get Trump to flip-flop in favor of their abortion position without much pressure in 2015-16. Yet they were powerless to stop him from watering down the abortion plank in the Republican platform that had been pro-life since Reagan. 

TRUMP SHOWS LITTLE SIGN OF BECOMING GOP LAME DUCK

By this reading, Trump is reacting to real political conditions rather than being the main cause of the pro-life movement’s problems. In any event, Trump’s successors will soon need to grapple with abortion on their own. Pro-lifers will have to try to exert political pressure on the 2028 Republican presidential primary field while resisting the election of Democrats who want to pass a federal abortion law that is more permissive than the Casey regime under the guise of “codifying Roe.”

The pro-life challenge will be ensuring that Dobbs was not a pyrrhic victory but the starting point for a culture and government policy that is more protective of unborn human life. It won’t be easy. They have virtually no Democratic support, and Republicans are proving to be less reliable allies than previously thought. But as the Trump era comes to a close, pro-lifers will have no choice but to start anew.

W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.