Former President Donald Trump declared this week that abortion should be left to the states, that there should be no federal abortion legislation because “this is all about the will of the people,” and “whatever they decide must be the law of the land.” He released a video stating his position on Monday and reiterated it later in the week.
By taking this stand, that abortion should not be a federal issue, Trump has not just betrayed his pro-life supporters but taken the side of Stephen A. Douglas over Abraham Lincoln. He has insisted that popular sovereignty, not moral principle, should decide the abortion question, just as Douglas insisted popular sovereignty in the new federal territories must decide the slavery question.
In practice, that means a patchwork of abortion laws across the country, at least for now, ranging from near-complete bans in some red states to unrestricted abortion until birth in some blue states. But it will not stay this way.
As Lincoln understood about slavery back in the 1850s, the eventual political consequences of tolerating abortion in some states will be the acceptance of it in all the states. (We’ve already seen this with the abortion referendums in Kansas and Ohio, with more referendums on the way.) Moral neutrality on abortion — Trump’s “popular sovereignty” approach — will weaken the foundation for legal prohibition and open the way to tolerance and eventually political acceptance.
Because of the first principles at stake here, the logic of America’s antebellum slavery debate applies entirely to
