Abortion continues to win elections for Democrats, creating an electoral headache for Republicans heading into November. While suburban voters tend to support reproductive freedom, the MAGA base won’t be satiated until there’s a federal ban. And Donald Trump, who appointed the three conservative justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, apparently thinks he can thread the needle.

On Friday, three days after Republicans lost George Santos’s New York congressional seat by nearly eight points, The New York Times reported that “Trump privately expresses support for a 16-week abortion ban.” The piece noted that Trump “has approached abortion transactionally since becoming a candidate in 2015,” and more recently, “has studiously avoided taking a clear position on restrictions to abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned.”

Trump has been all over the map in the primary. He talked broadly last fall about getting “both sides” to “agree to a number of weeks or months,” though didn’t specify whether such an agreement would take place at the state or federal level. “It could be state, or it could be federal,” Trump said on Meet the Press. “I don’t, frankly, care.” In that same interview, he called Florida’s six-week ban, signed into law by his former rival Ron DeSantis, a “terrible mistake,” but then last month, said how “proud” he was for having “terminated” Roe. 

It appears Trump is trying to stake out a new position ahead of the general election, at least according to the unnamed sources who spoke to the Times. “Know what I like about 16?” Trump told one. “It’s even. It’s four months.” For Trump, it seems that getting people to compromise their rights just comes down to marketing. (Trump’s campaign didn’t address his private remarks, telling the Times: “As President Trump has stated, he would sit down with both sides and negotiate a deal that everyone will be happy with.”)

Despite Trump’s often unhinged behavior and autocratic fantasies, he does have keen political instincts. He knows abortion is a loser for him and his party. A 16-week federal ban is presumably meant to sound more moderate even if it’s anything but. Such a proposal would likely leave red-state abortion bans in place, while limiting abortion in blue states. It appears to be a fig leaf to abortion-rights supporters while he runs for president, as his allies are reportedly “developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration.”

Trump helped win over the right by vowing to overturn Roe, though, despite making this pledge on a 2016 presidential debate stage, some voters might not have believed he’d really do it—or get the opportunity once in office. Hillary Clinton grasped the stakes of a Trump presidency, but at the time, he had no voting record and served as a Rorschach test, an opportunity for people to project their own desires on him. Trump enjoyed something that almost no presidential candidate has ever had: widespread name recognition without a voting record. And oddly, having once been a “very pro-choice” Democrat may have helped him with swing voters. But what Trump may or may not do in the White House is no longer hypothetical; he orchestrated the end for Roe, appeasing the right wing and endangering women’s lives. He can’t run away from that.

Since June 2022, when the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, Democrats have overperformed in elections across the country. Voters in deep-red Kansas rejected an antiabortion measure around six weeks later and access to abortion continued to galvanize voters in the 2022 midterms—as well as in the 2023 off-year elections.

Following such success at the polls, Democrats focused on abortion in New York’s third congressional race; the first advertisement that the democratic house majority PAC ran included a voice-over stating that Republican Mazi Pilip is “running on a party platform that calls for a ban on abortion.” During the one debate between Pilip and Democrat Tom Suozzi, she tried articulating a personal position, albeit one at odds with the GOP. “I chose to be a mother of seven children. That was my choice. I’m not going to force my own belief to any woman,” she said, adding that she was not going to support a national abortion ban. 

“Are you saying you’re pro-choice?” asked Suozzi, who questioned how she could say abortion is a choice while not supporting laws to give women the ability to make their own decisions. “I am Mazi Pilip. I am pro-life. This is me,” she said in response. An Ethiopian-born Jewish immigrant, Pilip was someone who didn’t stink of MAGA coming into the special election, and perhaps could convince mainstream suburban voters into believing a more moderate GOP existed. (Though a visit from House Speaker and far-right zealot Mike Johnson probably didn’t help Pilip in the Nassau suburbs.) In the end, voters sent Suozzi back to Congress, further shrinking the GOP’s slim majority in the House. 

Surely, Trump sees the writing on the wall when it comes to abortion, which is why sources close to him floated that seemingly more palatable 16-week ban idea. The very next day, however, the Times published something closer to what Trump’s real abortion agenda would be if returning to the White House, reporting that the former president’s allies and “officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights if he returns to power that would go far beyond proposals for a national ban or the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.”

While Trump won’t publicly get behind this effort, Jonathan F. Mitchell, the architect of Texas’s SB 8 law, which functionally overturned Roe in the state, told the Times that “we don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books.” Republicans could seize upon the 1873 Comstock Act to make it illegal to send abortion pills by mail. “I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Mitchell told the Times. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.” Yes, even Mitchell has a sense of how deeply unpopular ending abortion is! According to the Times, second-term policies under consideration include “banning the use of fetal stem cells in medical research for diseases like cancer, rescinding approval of abortion pills at the F.D.A. and stopping hundreds of millions in federal funding for Planned Parenthood.”

Meanwhile, organizations trying to protect reproductive rights are feeling financially strapped with abortion on the ballot in a quarter of US states this November. We know abortion is a loser for Republicans, but if they’re able to talk their way around it, that could mean another Trump administration and the end of reproductive freedom in this country. It could mean the beginning of an FDA that is dictated by religious beliefs and not by scientific ones. Removing the FDA approval for Mifepristone (one of the medicines used to end pregnancy), for example, could open the door to removing FDA approval for all sorts of other drugs, on religious or ideological grounds. A second Trump term could look a lot like The Handmaid’s Tale, though sadly, it won’t be fiction.