For much of the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump has attempted to maintain strategic ambiguity and plausible deniability about what he would do with abortion policy during a second term. In a rambling and incoherent press conference that touched on the topic last week, Trump stayed true to form in one critical sense: No one knew exactly what he was talking about. While some understood the former president to be saying he was open to using executive power to limit access to mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of all abortions, others thought that Trump seemed not to grasp what mifepristone was. Whichever of these interpretations is correct, the upshot seems to be the same: Trump would likely outsource abortion policy to those opposed to it, as he did in his first term, a move that would lead to unprecedented losses for reproductive rights.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump’s position on abortion has been to obfuscate. He has refused to answer questions about key issues, like whether he agrees with his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, that the Comstock Act, a 19th-century obscenity law, is actually an abortion ban. He has run on a platform that favors fetal personhood and endorses in vitro fertilization. Trump has claimed (implausibly) that he knows “nothing” about Project 2025, even though he flew on a private jet with its director, and even though the architects of Project 2025 are a veritable who’s who of Trump administration veterans.

Trump once sounded unwilling to touch mifepristone access. When the Supreme Court rejected an effort to block access to mifepristone mounted by a group of anti-abortion physicians (the court unanimously held that the doctors did not have standing to........

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