Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s favorite child, has made it official: She’s anti-abortion now, a convenient development in the final days of her father’s campaign.
During an interview with Real Clear Politics, Trump was asked to share her opinion on abortion. “I am pro-life, and unapologetically so,” she said.
Her rationale: Motherhood. “I respect all sides of a very personal and sensitive discussion,” Trump said. “But I am also a mother of three children, and parenthood affected me in a profound way in terms of how I think about these things.”
This is reportedly the first time Trump has made her anti-abortion stance public, perhaps in a bid to connect with the suburban women President Trump has been hemorrhaging. To skirt controversy, Ivanka was more comfortable maneuvering behind the scenes on the issue. This is, after all, the same woman who, along with her husband Jared Kushner, met with former Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in January 2017 and reportedly offered to increase the organization’s federal funding if they stopped providing abortions. Richards described this offer as a “bribe” in her memoir. Trump has long been willing to throw access to safe abortion out the window for political points, but she has never gone so far as to carry a torch for the anti-abortion movement publicly.
Planned Parenthood offers reproductive health care to millions of Americans each year, something that self-professed women’s advocate Ivanka Trump should admire. Perhaps she would in an alternate universe in which she didn’t compromise her milquetoast liberal politics for her father’s right-wing political aspirations. Alas, the woman who once convinced her father to defend Planned Parenthood during the 2016 Republican debates is long gone.
And as Forbes noted, Trump’s anti-abortion stance “appears at odds with [her] own efforts to empower women around the world, most notably her Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, with experts agreeing that one of the most important factors in allowing women to thrive is the ability to control how many children they have and when.” It’s almost as if her support for working moms and women in developing countries was a mirage of shallow bullshit from the jump!
Then again, in this same Real Clear Politics interview, Ivanka Trump embraced being labeled a “populist,” so perhaps words just don’t mean anything anymore