Trump has repaid evangelicals by targeting Planned Parenthood. But they’re naive if they think his support will last

The only time Trump has seemed genuine on abortion was when he said, in 2013, that ‘it’s never been my big issue’. It’s someone else’s big issue – big enough for them to hold their noses and vote for him – and he’s smart enough to know that

Of all the strange things about Donald Trump, the fact that he successfully courted evangelicals during his 2016 presidency campaign is one of the most bizarre. Even in the land of televangelists who fly private jets and ask for “prayer money” on specialist TV channels, the boastful billionaire with the totally real hair felt out of step with the hardline Christians who traditionally lobby the Republican Party.

Trump knew this, of course, and so he sought to placate them. When everyone else was up in arms about “grabbing women by the pussy”, he was whispering in their ears about banning abortion and talking the talk about filling the Supreme Court with judges happy to overturn Roe v Wade.

Has Donald Trump personally ever cared about abortion? I doubt it. He identified himself as pro-choice numerous times before he ran for president in 2016. But on the campaign trail, he said he thought women should be punished for abortion then backtracked when there was an uproar from the pro-lifers he thought would agree with him.

Most recently, after states emboldened by right-wing rhetoric began passing draconian abortion bans and restrictions, he tweeted that he was “pro-life” but didn’t agree with the bills in Alabama or Georgia, because he believes in “three restrictions – rape, incest and protecting the life of the mother”. The only time he seemed honest to me was when he said, on the Howard Stern show in 2013, that “it’s never been my big issue”. It’s someone else’s big issue – big enough for them to hold their noses and vote for him – and he’s smart enough to know that.

Trump is also smart enough to know that debts have to be repaid, and so this week, he paid the Christians right back. New rules brought in by his administration stipulate that family planning clinics receiving federal funds (known as Title X grants) cannot provide or refer patients for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or medical emergency. Such funds account for just under half of Planned Parenthood’s running costs. In other words, the Trump administration told Planned Parenthood that it would either have to stop abortion provision in all but the most extreme circumstances or lose half its budget overnight.

Planned Parenthood responded by pulling out of Title X altogether, saying that it couldn’t realistically operate while its hands are so tied. Not being able to talk honestly to patients about their options, they say, is an unworkable restriction. Republicans have in turn accused Planned Parenthood of harming Title X patients by refusing to capitulate.

A few weeks ago, I spent a week in Alabama visiting clinics and speaking to Alabamans about the situation in their state. So far, Alabama is the only state facing the possibility of an outright abortion ban. People who drove me round the cities in cars with bibles on their dashboards told me they didn’t believe abortion was “right”, but they still believed it was necessary. An elderly woman called Janet who sat outside a clinic in the city of Montgomery all day with a pro-choice sign told me she wouldn’t go home until women’s rights were protected again. A teenage girl who grew up in a rural village in the middle of the state described how her evangelical Christian mother drove her secretly to a Planned Parenthood clinic at the other side of Alabama to get an abortion so they wouldn’t encounter the people in their village who regularly travelled into the city to protest outside the nearest facility.

People who worked at the clinics were cagey, and usually referred me to their press department after a couple of questions. Their entrances were reinforced, with CCTV cameras and windows with blackout blinds pulled firmly down. Everyday Alabamans told me they thought the anti-abortion protesters were “kind of crazy”. They resented hardliners in their local government and lobbyists who pushed presidents towards reform.

Even those who believed abortion was wrong rarely said they thought the choice should be taken away. Most middle-aged Alabamans were perplexed by the fact that closing down Planned Parenthood and similar clinics had become a mainstream Christian idea; one told me she’d had an abortion 30 years ago at a state hospital and never even considered that she might encounter people holding up pictures of mangled Photoshopped foetuses while calling her a murderer. It’s worth bearing in mind that a significant minority of the protesters who do that these days are paid by religious organisations to do so, which does somewhat call into question the sincerity of their beliefs.

The people who will be hit hardest by Planned Parenthood losing a chunk of its funding are not the kinds of people who routinely make trips to Washington DC. They are teenagers who live in rural areas, people of colour and people on low incomes. They rarely have their voices heard apart from inside the walls of such specialist clinics. Planned Parenthood doesn’t just provide them with abortions: mostly, it provides advice, contraception, cancer screening and – most popular of all – STD testing and treatment. Abortion services account for less than 5 per cent of what they do, but that hasn’t stopped them from becoming Public Enemy Number One with anti-abortion protesters and church groups. No pro-life rally is complete nowadays without 100 mass-produced signs reading “DEFUND PLANNED PARENTHOOD” held aloft by fresh-faced students from ultra-conservative backgrounds.

Now the defunding is underway, however, conservatives might find themselves in a bind. After Texas passed stringent laws which led to the closure of over half of its family planning clinics, a New England Journal of Medicine study found “a disproportionate increase in the rate of childbirth covered by Medicaid”, adding that it was likely those pregnancies were “unintended” since the increase specifically occurred in places where clinics were closed. Medicaid comes at a cost to the taxpayer, and that’s an especially high cost considering that under privatised healthcare in America, a straightforward childbirth is routinely billed at more than $10,000. And although Republican voters tend to be disproportionately Christian, their main concerns tend to be lower taxes and less government interference in people’s lives. Banning abortion and paying for unplanned pregnancies – and then large low-income families – isn’t going to be a massive vote-winner.

In other words, Trump needs to be realistic about how much he’s willing to repay those evangelicals. He shouldn’t be naive enough to assume that the voters on the ground are as ideologically concerned with abortion as the lobbyists and wealthy religious figures he hears from.

Equally, the lobbyists who want to challenge Roe v Wade shouldn’t be naive enough to think that what Trump did this week is the beginning of something more. He’s paid them back for a leg-up, but he now has the voters they represent firmly ensconced in his base. When the tide turns on abortion, so will he.