Former President Donald Trump was campaigning in Nevada, regaling rallygoers with tales of all the revenue raised by his China tariffs during his first term in office, when a baby started crying in the background.

Trump interrupted his remarks to address the cries. “And don’t let that baby bother you because it doesn’t bother me,” he said. “To me, it’s that beautiful.” The crowd began to clap and cheer, prompting Trump to turn and look around. “Where is that baby?” he asked, followed by audience chants of “USA! USA!”

“That’s a good-looking baby,” Trump continued. “Don’t worry about it, mom. It doesn’t bother me. You know what it means? Happy, youthful, beautiful baby, perfect baby.”

In many respects, typical of the interplay between Trump and the supporters who attend his rallies. In nine years on the campaign trail, he has been known to pull small children dressed in Trump costumes onstage and show them off to the whole crowd. His interactions with children are often comical, deliberately or not — placing Halloween candy on the head of a White House trick-or-treater in a Minions costume or asking a young boy if he is still “a believer in Santa” at Christmastime — and politicians were kissing babies long before his famous 2015 escalator ride.

But it has also increasingly become a branding exercise for Trump. He wants to be seen, and have the whole Republican Party be perceived as, pro-baby and pro-family, even when that means taking positions that rankle the social conservatives who use those labels to describe themselves. When Trump brags about being the “father of IVF,” you know it is not your father’s social conservatism.

When the Alabama Supreme Court issued a decision earlier this year describing cryogenically frozen embryos as “extrauterine children,” many pro-life activists cheered. Trump was not among them. There was widespread public concern that the ruling would complicate in vitro fertilization, a process by which a mother’s egg is fertilized outside the womb. Trump urged the Republican-controlled legislature to act swiftly to protect IVF access, and when it did so, he celebrated the achievement. 

Yet Trump did not make it sound like a break with the pro-life movement but rather something consistent with a broader family-making and baby-making ethos that abortion opponents should support. 

“Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the vast majority of Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and pro-life Americans, I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” Trump said at the time. “What could be more beautiful or better than that?” He has since called for subsidizing IVF treatments via mandated private insurance coverage or taxpayer funds.

“As you know, I was always for IVF, right from the beginning, as soon as we heard about it,” Trump told NBC News in August. “It’s fertilization and it’s helping women and men and families. But it’s helping women [be] able to have a baby. Some have great difficulty, and a lot have been very happy with the results, as you know.”

Trump wasn’t done. “And what we’re doing — and we’re doing this because we just think it’s great and we need great children, beautiful children, in our country. We actually need them,” he continued. “And we are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment.”

This declaration took conservatives by surprise, and many found it an unpleasant one. This would be a major subsidy or mandate that violates the consciences of religious taxpayers, at a minimum. But perhaps they should have been less surprised. 

The 2024 Republican platform adopted at the Milwaukee convention contained a revised pro-life plank that vowed to “Protect and Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States, on the Issue of Life.” Republicans, the updated platform said, “proudly stand for families and Life.” But the devil lies in the details.

“We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF fertility treatments,” Republicans proclaimed in their first platform statement on the issue of abortion since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Two things jump out. One is that this is more equivocal than the 2016 GOP platform statement on abortion, which, among other things, said, “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.” The other is that IVF is now part of the pro-life section of the platform.

A similar shift has taken place on marriage. “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents,” the 2024 platform states in its sole use of the word “marriage” in the entire document. “We will end policies that punish families.” The 2016 version defined “traditional marriage” as a union “between one man and one woman” and condemned the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling on same-sex marriage. It also used the word “marriage” 19 times.

Much of the form of social conservatism remains present, but the platform is agnostic on much specific content. It is broadly natalist, supportive of families, procreation, and religion. It does not exactly affirm first-trimester abortion or same-sex marriage. At the same time, it does not directly oppose them. 

Gay marriage is not a live political issue. Neither, for that matter, is banning IVF, notwithstanding Democratic protestations to the contrary. But outlawing abortion is, at least in red states, in no small part because Trump won his first election in 2016. The real estate tycoon turned reality TV star turned Republican presidential candidate had no real record of social conservatism. He briefly ran to the left of Pat Buchanan for the 2000 Reform Party presidential nomination, telling NBC News’s Meet the Press in 1999 that he was “very pro-choice,” but his abortive campaign didn’t last long.

During the 2016 Republican primaries, the leaders of the established Christian Right largely backed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who would go on to beat Trump in the Iowa caucuses on the strength of his evangelical support. There were also conservative Christian activists supportive of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and neurosurgeon and inspirational author Ben Carson. Trump’s big issue was immigration, not the family or abortion.

Trump did, however, reconcile himself to the strong religious-conservative element of the Republican base. His purchase of a table at Billy Graham’s 95th birthday party in 2013 was perhaps an early sign that he was serious about seeking the GOP nomination. He never fully learned to talk their language — he initially seized on an arcane part of the tax code that prohibits churches from supporting political campaigns as a way to win them over — but respected their place in the party’s big tent.

This included making a series of specific commitments to social and legal conservatives, including a list of prospective Supreme Court nominees largely acceptable to both of them. He kept those promises. Trump got to appoint three Supreme Court justices. Every single one of them voted to overturn Roe. That cannot be said for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, or George W. Bush, though pre-Trump appointees Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were crucial (Alito wrote the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization majority opinion).

Reversing Roe was the single biggest accomplishment of organized social conservatism and, arguably, the conservative legal movement. Trump has never disavowed this achievement, pronouncing himself “proud” of it. Neither has he, or many Republican politicians, ever been totally comfortable with it.

Trump denounced Florida’s ban on abortion after six weeks as “terrible.” This could originally be dismissed as an opportunistic attack on a rival for the GOP nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who signed the measure into law. But even after Trump had defeated DeSantis, he was wary of being associated with restrictions on abortions that take place in the earlier stages of pregnancy, even as he continued to press Democrats on whether they support any gestational limits on abortion whatsoever. 

Known for The Art of the Deal, Trump began describing Dobbs as a ruling that gave pro-lifers a place at the table as lawmakers haggled over a grand bargain on abortion. “Pro-lifers have a tremendous power now with that termination[of[ofRoe]to negotiate. They had none,” he said at a 2023 Alabama state GOP fundraising dinner. “They didn’t have any before that ruling. They had no power whatsoever. [People] could kill babies at any time they wanted, including after what we would call birth. They could kill babies. Now [pro-lifers] have tremendous power.”

“But on pro-life, I will tell you what I did on Roe v. Wade, nobody else — for 50 years they’ve been trying to do it. I got it done,” Trump said in an interview last year. “And now we’re in a position to make a really great deal and a deal that people want.” He added, “We’re in a position now — and I’m going to be leading the charge — we’re in the position now where we can get something that the whole country can agree with, and that’s only because I got us out of the Roe v. Wade where the pro-life people had absolutely nothing to say.”

Trump is borrowing a tactic from one of the social conservatives’ least favorite presidents, Bill Clinton. He is triangulating on abortion, especially: running to red-state Republicans’ left but to virtually all Democrats’ right, much as Clinton won in 1996 by ditching his party’s left flank while branding congressional Republicans as radically conservative.

Four years ago, while Roe was still in effect, Trump’s running mate was Vice President Mike Pence, a devout evangelical and strong opponent of legal abortion. Pence was one of Trump’s ambassadors to the religious Right. This time around, Trump is running with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), a social conservative who has adopted a lot of Trump’s messaging on these difficult issues.

“I grew up in a working-class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn’t have any other options,” Vance said at the vice presidential debate earlier this month. “And, you know, one of them is actually very dear to me. And I know she’s watching tonight, and I love you.”

Initially defined by his glib references to “childless cat ladies,” the Hillbilly Elegy author turned politician has lately tried a more empathetic approach. “One of the things that changed is in the state of Ohio. We had a referendum in 2023, and the people of Ohio voted overwhelmingly, by the way, against my position [on abortion],” he said in his debate with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). “And I think that what I learned from that, Norah, is that we’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust. So many young women would love to have families. So many young women also see an unplanned pregnancy as something that’s going to destroy their livelihood, destroy their education, destroy their relationships.”

It’s possible that triangulation will please no one. “It is extremely tragic that he is now defending abortion,” Live Action’s Lila Rose wrote on X about Vance’s debate comments. “This is the Trump influence. It is destroying the Republican Party.”

The Harris-Walz campaign viewed the matter rather differently. In response to the same debate, the Democratic ticket blasted out a statement saying flatly, “Trump and Vance want to ban abortion nationwide.”

Trump exaggerates the degree to which compromise can be found on the moral issues that animate a nontrivial part of his political coalition. The ethical concerns about the embryo destruction often involved in IVF cannot be easily waved away, even if there is little support for strongly regulating the practice. Trump and Vance’s critics inside the Republican Party worry that they are sawing off all three legs of the Reaganite “three-legged stool,” economic, social, and national security conservatism, and replacing them with an electorally unproven populism. Social conservative anxiety was heightened when Melania Trump, like every Republican first lady since Roe was decided in 1973, came out in favor of legal abortion.

At the same time, abortion opponents keep losing on ballot initiatives even in red states. And as was the case with taxpayer-funded embryonic stem-cell research over 20 years ago, which was also opposed on pro-life grounds for its destruction of embryos, there were voters and elected officials who opposed abortion but supported this research. “The support of embryonic stem-cell research is consistent with pro-life, pro-family values,” then-Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, said at the time. “I believe that human life begins in the womb, not a Petri dish or refrigerator.”

Trump, for his part, more bluntly describes abortion as “killing babies,” especially in the later stages of pregnancy, than any recent Republican nominee. There is a chance that his framing of the issue could reach a larger audience than appeals to natural law, especially if taken up by polarizing messengers post-Trump.

The more immediate challenge is whether Trump and Vance can split the baby, while celebrating babies, in this close election.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.