Zip It – GOP muzzles talk about abortion

The muzzled dog that didn’t bark at last week’s Republican National Convention was abortion.  

And with good reason. 

Heading into the fall general election, abortion remains a political timebomb that the GOP doesn’t know how to defuse. 

Since three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices joined in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, Republicans have lost in Kansas, Kentucky and Virginia, when the races became proxies for abortion rights.  

Even in ruby-red Ohio, Buckeye State voters cast ballots in support of abortion rights last November.  

As a result, last week’s convention sidestepped abortion at every dangerous turn.  

Prominent abortion rights leaders tried to raise their voices when they sent a June 10 letter to former President Trump calling for the platform to endorse a federally-imposed limits on abortion. 

Instead, they got silence. 

While the 2016 platform mentioned abortion rights 35 times, the 2024 platform mentions it only once.  

That prompted small protests in Milwaukee.  

On the Sunday night before the convention began, the Washington Post reported that a large crowd of abortion opponents displayed their fury with the platform’s watered-down stance on abortion.  

At a protest near a convention welcome party, the protestors shouted “Blood, blood, blood on your hands!” 

Some of the protests became personal.  

Activists followed Kari Lake, the Arizona GOP Senate candidate, down the street at one point yelling “Kari Lake and Donald Trump support abortion!” 

Conservatives got further incensed when a primetime speaking slot went to rapper Kanye West’s former girlfriend Amber Rose. Anti-abortion activist and podcaster Matt Walsh called her a “pro-abortion feminist and self-proclaimed slut with a face tattoo whose only claim to fame is having sex with rappers.”  

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, planned to use his voice to end the convention’s silence on opposition to abortion but told reporters he shut down protests because of the attempted assassination of Trump on the Saturday before the convention. 

“We don’t feel like now is the time to speak,” Perkins told reporters. 

Perkins’s acquiescence fit with the GOP preventing C-SPAN and print reporters from attending platform committee meetings.  

The committee produced a 16-page platform that only once mentions abortion. It does not call for a federal ban, but came close by pointing to the power of state legislatures and state courts to impose restrictions or ban abortion. 

But that sly dodge angered anti-abortion Republicans. They wanted a celebration of their victorious 50-year fight to end federal protection of abortion rights. 

Instead they got a convention staged to avoid “unnecessarily verbose” policy positions that might fuel Democrats’ effort to call attention to the GOP’s stand against abortion rights. 

The Trump campaign similarly tried to distance itself from Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration, that calls for government tracking stillbirths, miscarriages and abortions. It also singled out abortion pills as “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.” 

Project 2025 even picked up on Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) attack on support for the abortion rights of U.S. military personnel and their families. 

More evidence of the GOP muzzling debate on abortion became apparent when Ohio Sen. JD Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate.  

Vance had little to say about abortion in his speech to the convention.  

But Vance is a man who has equated abortion to “murder.” 

In a 2021 interview, he said he didn’t support abortion even if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest.  

Less than a day after his vice presidential acceptance speech, Vance scrubbed language from his website describing himself as “100 percent pro-life” and praising the “historic Dobbs decision” for putting “a new era of society into motion.”    

Trump, who once spoke of the need for punishment for women who had abortions, similarly avoided the issue of abortion when he spoke at the convention. 

The former president previously bragged about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade.  

The GOP’s silence on such a major issue revealed that their strategists have not hit on a way to stop Democrats from using abortion rights against the Trump-Vance ticket.  

Polls show overwhelming public support for abortion rights. In May 2024, a Gallup poll found that just 12 percent of voters want to make abortion illegal in all cases.

Last week President Biden took a bold step by endorsing sweeping reforms intended to alter the makeup of the current Supreme Court that ended national abortion rights. 

He endorsed policies to limit the terms of Supreme Court justices.   

He also called for ethics reforms aimed at Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two key abortion opponents on the court who are surrounded by charges of scandalous behavior. 

Meanwhile, the GOP’s problems with abortion rights continue to grow. 

In recent months, the Alabama Supreme Court tried to criminalize in vitro fertilization. That effort was overturned by the Republican-controlled state legislature due to loud barking from Trump Republicans who warned that it remains a danger to Trump’s candidacy. 

The muzzle will be off at the Democratic convention next month.  

And it’s sure to be too loud to ignore come Election Day. 
But last week, abortion was the muzzled dog unable to bark and disturb the party in Milwaukee. 

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.