Framing The Future: The GOP's Extremist Abortion Platform
It looks like there are nearly a dozen states with abortion initiatives on the ballot in November, including key swing states Florida, Nevada, probably Arizona, possibly Pennsylvania. Ballot initiatives will also help Democratic Senate candidates in Maryland, Missouri and Montana— and a progressive independent, Dan Osborn, in Nebraska. There’s also one in Colorado and even a couple in hopeless red hellholes Arkansas and South Dakota.
Meanwhile, Trump understands how unpopular the GOP anti-Choice positions are and is demanding that everyone STFU about abortion and let him get elected and then ban it. But the RNC selected Ed Martin, the deputy policy director for the convention’s platform committee, to be one of the 3 “to help, reported CNN, “craft the party’s platform, which serves as a blueprint for the Republican Party’s agenda by detailing policy positions and how Republicans and former President Donald Trump would govern if elected. Andrew Kaczyński and Em Steck wrote that Martin “has a history of pushing extreme anti-abortion positions, including advocating for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest. He also entertained the possibility of jailing women who get abortions and the doctors who perform them... Martin has consistently espoused a hardline position on abortion, criticizing Republicans with a more moderate stance on the issue, and has even questioned the safety of birth control. ‘The true bane of the pro-life movement is the faction of fake pro-lifers who claim to believe in the sanctity of human life but are only willing to vote that way with a list of exceptions,’ Martin said on his radio show in June 2022— several days after Roe v. Wade was struck down.” He could easily have had Trump in mind.
He’s a hard right crackpot and former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, who lives on conspiracy theories and runs Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagles— a neo-fascist advocacy group. He co-authored The Conservative Case for Trump with Schlaffy in 2016.
The GOP stance on abortion has undergone a significant transformation over the past few decades, getting worse and more radical by the year as they party establishment gave in to the religionist nuts. Initially, the position was not nearly as extreme and one-sided as it is today. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were factions within the party that supported a woman's right to choose, and the focus was more on balancing individual freedoms with moral considerations. However, starting in the late 1980s and 1990s, the party began to shift towards a more hardline anti-abortion stance, a shift marked by increasingly restrictive state-level abortion laws and a push for federal legislation to limit access to abortion services. Trump’s extremist Supreme Court appointments did the trick.
Obviously, this increasing extremism has had profound impacts on women's rights. The restrictions imposed by Republican-led states have made it significantly more difficult for women, particularly those in marginalized communities, to access safe and legal abortions. The GOP's stance has also emboldened anti-abortion activists to push for more draconian measures, such as criminalizing abortion providers and even the women seeking abortions. Their extremism on abortion is not just a political stance; it represents a broader assault on women's autonomy and health and on individual rights across the board. The party's leaders, like Ed Martin, exemplify this radical shift by advocating for positions that were once considered fringe, now becoming mainstream within the GOP. This context underscores the urgency of the upcoming ballot initiatives and the critical need for voters to be informed and engaged in protecting reproductive rights.
And despite Trump’s fiat, Martin has continued to advocate for some of the most extreme restrictions on abortion, discounting the case involving the rape of a 10-year-old girl from Ohio as a reason for exceptions, and even falsely claiming that abortions are never performed to save the life of a mother.
“Don’t tell me to stop talking about abortion,” Martin said in April 2024 on his radio show. “Don’t tell me that because you don’t think it’s a winner politically, I’m supposed to stop talking about abortion.”
And he is very hardcore on banning abortion, something Trump fears is an electoral detriment. “Abortion,” wrote Kaczynski and Steck, “has emerged as a significant liability for Republicans. Voters have affirmed abortion rights in every state referendum since 2022 and GOP candidates across the country have softened their positions,” although they’re not fooling anyone and many voters plan to hold them accountable in November.
During a June 2024 appearance on Trump ally Roger Stone’s podcast, Martin said he’s heavily involved in “every aspect” of discussions around the platform, and reiterated his stance on abortion, pushing back on a report that Trump’s campaign was attempting to soften the platform’s position on abortion.
“The platform will respect life in every moment,” Martin told Stone.
In May 2022, in the days after a draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade was leaked, Martin discussed on his radio show possible prison sentences for women and abortion doctors. Martin said if anti-abortion activists accepted abortion rights advocates’ framing— that it was about a woman’s right— women could not be imprisoned for getting an abortion. But if the argument was reframed as being about a baby, the question whether to punish women was open.
“The late Phyllis Schlafly, whom I worked so closely with, used to say, ‘If you get to claim and frame the argument, you almost certainly get to win.’ In other words, if you take their framing, it’s a woman’s right. Are you gonna put women in jail? No. It’s about a baby. Now, what do we do? Frame the argument. Own the argument,” he said.
Earlier, Martin was discussing Louisiana’s trigger law, which immediately banned abortion in almost all cases in the state after Roe was struck down.
“If you ban abortion in Louisiana, is a doctor who has an abortion breaking the law? Yes. Should he be punished? Yes— I think that seems obvious. What is the punishment? Not sure yet. Could be criminal, could be a jail sentence, I suppose,” he said.
Martin also compared abortion to a family starving a child to death purposely in saying the state had an interest in some form of punishment.
“What do you do with the woman that has an abortion? I don’t think we have a good answer yet. Some people say that they shouldn’t be held liable in any way,” he said. “Some people say they should have some kind of penalty, something on their record,” he said. “I certainly think that you’re gonna find a lot of people that step away from jail time. But if you believe it’s a baby— I do— then you have to do something to protect the baby.”
“You don’t just turn your back and say, ‘Oh, well, you know what? In that family over there, I, I don’t care what they do to their family, that’s their family,’” he continued. “’I don’t care if they take their five-year-old kid, and they, and they, let ‘em starve to death.’ No, you don’t do that. You say, ‘We have to have some laws that hold us together, and we have to be careful about it’…But we certainly would say in the case of starvation or life and death, there is an interest in the state to say, ‘Hey, what are we gonna do here?’”
…Martin has also said he opposes language in abortion bans that allows for abortion to save the life of a mother, falsely saying on his radio show in June 2022, “It’s an absolute scientific fact that no abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother. None, zero, zilch.”
The Supreme Court ruled last week that emergency abortions could be performed in Idaho in cases where the life of a pregnant woman is at stake, though the decision provides little clarity on the threshold for life-saving exceptions.
Martin also falsely claimed multiple times that medically-induced abortion, which he referred to as a chemical abortion, and birth control pills were dangerous and “damaging,” repeatedly criticizing the “loosey goosey regulation around pill abortion” and that it could be ordered via mail.
…Martin is one of three leaders now shaping the GOP platform— along with Russ Vought, the influential former White House Office of Management and Budget director in the Trump administration, and Randy Evans, a former US ambassador to Luxembourg during the Trump administration.
Jerrad Christian is running for Congress in eastern and central Ohio, fighting to protect women’s Choice against a far right MAGA lunatic, Troy Balderson, who never saw a bill taking away people’s individual rights that he didn’t sign onto. “Balderson,” wrote Christian, “co-sponsored a national life at conception act. There is no getting around that his goal is to take freedom from women. He has told us as much with his actions, we don't need to hear his words. Ohio overwhelmingly voted last November to enshrine reproductive rights into our constitution and there is nothing Republican extremists would rather do than override the will of the people by passing a federal law.”
Eric Wilson is running to replace anti-choice fanatic Derrick Van Orden in a Wisconsin swing district. “Derrick continues to show his true colors and his fight to control women,” he told us today. “Extremist Derrick Van Orden is doubling down, claiming that life begins at conception and boasting that he's ‘ideologically aligned’ with the House Freedom Caucus, which supports a total nationwide abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the woman's life. He also has equated abortion to genocide. This is not the type of person we need leading WI-03. I believe in unrestricted abortion access because the government should not be making these decisions for women.”
