When a draft of the 2024 Republican Party platform began to circulate, headlines loudly declared that the GOP had moderated its stance on abortion. The truth is much different. The platform picks up on a strategy Donald Trump has used throughout the 2024 campaign: sending mixed messages that leave voters with no clear idea of what a second Trump presidency will entail—and that allow Trump to convince different constituencies that he will do what they want in the end. At the same time, the platform is studiously silent about the role of Trump judges, and obscures the reality that a federal judiciary transformed by Trump would likely move the country toward the recognition of personhood—and potential national abortion and in vitro fertilization bans—no matter how slowly the executive branch moves.

Since the 1980s, the Republican Party platform has endorsed what abortion opponents call the human life amendment: changing the meaning of the word person in the 14th Amendment to apply to fetuses and embryos from the moment an egg is fertilized. The platform has also pledged to nominate certain kinds of judges—understood to be those who thought that Roe had been wrongly decided. Ronald Reagan won over disenchanted blue-collar social conservatives with his support for the human life amendment and for Roe-hostile judges.

Over the years, the GOP has had second thoughts about its relationship to the anti-abortion movement and has considered rewriting the platform. In the 1990s, Lee Atwater, the architect of George H.W. Bush’s first winning slash-and-burn presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis, worried that the anti-abortion movement would drag down the party and proposed making the GOP a “big tent,” open to those with a wide range of positions on abortion. Powerful conservatives united........

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