Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.
“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.
“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”
Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Her decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.
In 2022, in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling that had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.
Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying the states should decide abortion rights.
But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.
Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.
Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.
Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.
Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.
“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”
And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.
