A Horrifying Heaping of Anti-Abortion Good Faith

We at Bad Faith Times determined long ago that right-wing good faith is usually chilling and always antidemocratic. 

Whether it’s Republican lawmakers or right-wing judges appointed to carry out the movement’s careful dismantling of every last vestige of majoritarian rule, when the American right says what they mean, it flies in the face of everything that underpins a viable democratic republic. 

And yes, it’s startling and sometimes terrifying when these folks operate in good faith. But it’s also clarifying. I encourage it, in fact. We need more good faith from the far right. 

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We got a heavy dose of that good faith this week with Donald Trump’s TIME interview, in which he said he would not stop state governments from tracking women’s pregnancies and punishing them for seeking or obtaining abortion services. In trying to deflect and maintain the powerful incoherence of fascism, Trump said he would be hands-off if and when state-level officials created a Handmaid's Tale reality in which the government is aware of every pregnancy and its progress. 

Trump, a skilled politician in all the most vexing ways, bobbed and weaved on the question of whether he would sign a federal law banning abortion care, or instituting limitations on that care that would essentially end all legal abortion in the United States. He said it didn’t matter if he would sign such legislation because Republicans would never have the filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority required to pass such a bill. That many Senate Republicans have spoken openly about killing the filibuster to push a nationwide abortion ban to the president’s desk did not enter this equation, for whatever reason. 

And if you want to know whether Trump would sign such a catastrophic bill – one that would lead to unspeakable humanitarian crises across the US – the answer is yes, of course he would. No one has delivered for the anti-abortion movement like Trump. They see him – a casino magnate, a rapist, a mobster, an exploiter of Jesus Christ himself – as a saintly figure sent by God to end reproductive rights in the United States. Trump would absolutely oversee the criminalization of all reproductive health care in the US. You’re fooling yourself if you have any questions about this. 

The tracking of pregnancies is a long-held strategy and policy goal of the radical anti-abortion movement. When I worked as an editor for Rewire.News, a reproductive rights publication, we reported on Republican state officials who kept spreadsheets tracking the menstrual cycles of women who visited health clinics that provide abortion services. Yes, it’s as fucking gross and invasive as it sounds. But it’s clarifying: These people want total control over the bodies of humans who can become pregnant. They aren’t shy about saying so either. 

This surveillance of periods and pregnancy was not isolated to a few monstrous state-level officials who had come to prominence in organizations dedicated to ending abortion access. Trump’s head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Scott Lloyd – a frothing anti-abortion extremist – carefully tracked the menstrual cycles of teenage migrants in the federal government’s care when the Trump administration created migrant concentration camps in 2018. Lloyd even met with pregnant migrants to talk them out of seeking abortion care, and denied teenagers access to abortion services. Even when a pregnant migrant teen said she would self harm if she could not have an abortion, Lloyd – fixated on the reproductive capacity of young people – tried to coerce her out of seeking care. These people's zealotry cannot be overstated.

Now imagine an army of Scott Lloyds operating at the highest levels of government, with no judicial pushback against their most brazen anti-abortion instincts. That's what's coming in 2025 if Trump bullies his way back into power.

This sort of abortion surveillance will become commonplace in most of the United States during a second Trump term. This is not a worst case scenario, or some liberal fever dream. It is a guarantee that states run by Republicans – usually through laser-guided gerrymandering and voter suppression – will spend untold resources creating databases of menstrual cycles and pregnancies so they can properly punish those who don’t comply with draconian state laws and statutes. Trump told TIME he would do nothing to oppose such a system. 

Maybe you think this is all hyperbolic panic from someone with crushing existential dread about Trump’s potential return to the White House and how it will be radically different from his first go round (this time with 420 percent more vengeance and political persecution and paramilitary activity!). Perhaps you take solace in the overwhelming support for abortion access we’ve seen at the polls since the bad-faith Republican justices overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Hell, an Alabama Democrat in March won a special election by 25 points after making abortion rights and IVF access central to her campaign. A pro-abortion ballot measure passed easily in Kansas in 2022! Kentucky voters two years ago said no to a proposed anti-abortion change to the state's constitution! Nowhere in the nation are their anti-abortion majorities. They are a tiny and determined and well funded lot. 

These are all clear signs that the American populace at large has zero appetite for a fascist anti-reproductive rights agenda. It’s basically the only reason why Democrats could (should?) gain congressional seats and retain the presidency this fall. 

My warning would be not to lull ourselves into a false sense of security about the future of reproductive health care access in the US. In a second Trump term, pro-abortion rights referendums and court rulings and state laws will be ignored or nullified by a federal government that will not recognize any semblance of law or precedent. Pro-choice activists could work like hell to get abortion onto state ballots, watch those measures earn stunning levels of support from voters, and have it all come to nothing under an administration that will deliver the goods to its most loyal customers: Anti-abortion zealots who have dedicated their lives to stripping women of bodily autonomy. Ballot measures and Democratic governors and state legislatures will not save abortion rights and access in a Roe-less nation run by a man who pledges to rule like a dictator – a promise that should be taken seriously considering the political movement that bankrolls him despises democracy. 

When the right deals in good faith, we must listen. It reveals everything about their actual goals and clarifies the stakes for this and future elections – if there are any of the free and fair variety beyond 2024. The abortion rights landscape will get measurably worse in a hurry if Republicans take the presidency in November if Trump is to be believed. There’s no reason to doubt him. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.