Opinion | Sorry, Trump. The Issue of Abortion Is Not Going Away.

If there is one thing we have learned from Republicans during this election, it is that they would like the issue of abortion to disappear.

Donald Trump, who only eight years ago called for “some kind of punishment” to be meted out to women who procured abortions, now speaks of “reproductive rights,” a formulation preferred by proponents of legal abortion. References to abortion have been all but eliminated from the party’s platform. Even JD Vance, whose opposition to abortion is perhaps his most firmly established political position, now says that the oral abortifacient mifepristone should remain accessible.

This retreat is of course understandable. For years abortion appeared to be a mobilizing issue for Republican voters, particularly the evangelical base. But ever since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in its Dobbs decision in June 2022, the issue has become a liability, and a serious one, for the G.O.P. From Kansas to Ohio, majorities have made it clear that they support at least some form of legal abortion. In Michigan the issue arguably re-elected Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022. Mr. Trump blames abortion for his party’s losses during that year’s midterm elections.

One could argue, with only the faintest hint of cynicism, that for Republicans, abortion has outlived whatever usefulness it once possessed. It’s not that they want to reverse their previous position (always a delicate operation for any politician); they just want to forget they ever held it.

But abortion will not go away. It resists all attempts at moderation and compromise. To treat it as we do other issues is to fail to understand it. It is not a procedural legal matter for the courts. It is not a prudential question to be negotiated by lawmakers. It is not within the scope of what we call “public health,” subject to the cost-benefit analysis of federal and state regulators. Ultimately it is not a political question in the narrow sense of the word, but a moral one, to which there are really only two serious answers: It is either good or evil.

Since Dobbs, Democrats have increasingly come around to this view. They are now inclined to speak of abortion rights in sweeping moral terms as the very foundation of women’s freedom and equality. This was not always the case. For many decades after Roe v. Wade in 1973, Democrats tended to treat the issue more cautiously. Even the most fervent supporters often preferred to frame it as a matter of safety — of preventing the so-called back-alley abortions that they said were likely to take place if the procedure were outlawed.

So long as a right to abortion was guaranteed by the judiciary, the moral dimension of the issue was irrelevant for Democrats, at least politically. They were instead forced to reckon with the practical question of what restrictions, if any, applied to the right. Some were willing to accept compromises: Parental notification laws for minors and mandatory waiting periods were established. When the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was passed in 2003, it was supported by more than one-quarter of Democrats in the House and about one-third of Democrats in the Senate. This was the age of “safe, legal and rare” — Bill Clinton’s memorably undogmatic ideal.

For Republicans, by contrast, it was easy to occupy the moral high ground. They called abortion murder. They denounced unelected judges for having imposed a fabricated “right” on the American people. The political consequences of outlawing a procedure that had been carried out millions of times since 1973, while foreseeable, were remote. That was a question for another day.

After Dobbs, the roles reversed. Republicans now find themselves seeking compromise. Strident talk about “the unborn” has given way to muddled debates about the relative merits of six-week and 15-week thresholds and the applicability of the Comstock Act of 1873, which may or may not prohibit the mailing of abortifacients. At a Fox News town hall last week, Mr. Trump criticized abortion restrictions in some states for being “too tough” and assured his audience that “those are going to be redone.”

For Democrats, by contrast, there is no longer any political upside to being nuanced. Their message is that abortion is a universal right, whether acknowledged by the Supreme Court or not. To suggest now that it ought to be rare is not a humane recognition that every abortion is at least tinged with sorrow but rather an affront to female autonomy. Absent another major shift in the legal landscape (a proposed federal codification of the old Roe standard, for example), there is no reason to expect the rhetoric of either party to change.

It is not an accident that whichever side is forced to pretend that abortion is amenable to compromise struggles politically. That is because the moral logic of the issue is inherently binary: If abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, it is no more justifiable at six weeks than it is at 15, no more tolerable in California than in Louisiana. If abortion is a mere medical procedure like a tonsillectomy — albeit one that is critical to the freedom, equality and dignity of women — it should be available in any month of pregnancy.

To convey the true nature of the issue demands an almost mythic register: Abortion is the blessed gift of Prometheus that has led us out of the primordial darkness of patriarchy — or it is the stolen Rhinegold in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle with which the palace of Valhalla was bought: an ancient, unspeakable loss that is the origin of an inherently corrupt political and social order.

These two conceptions of abortion, I suggest, are opposite sides of the same coin. It is a coin that can remain spinning for only so long until its resting face is revealed.

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