What Melania Trump’s Decision to Speak Out on Abortion Says About the GOP

Former First Lady Melania Trump has been conspicuously absent on the campaign trail during her husband’s 2024 presidential election bid. Yet in a recent interview to promote her forthcoming memoir, Melania, Trump made a bombshell revelation on one of the most divisive issues of this election: abortion. “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does to her own body?” asked the former First Lady.

Not since the 1970s has the wife of the Republican presidential candidate taken such a clear pro-abortion-rights position during a campaign. This stands in stark contrast to Trump’s silence on the issue throughout her tenure as First Lady. Likewise, it distinguishes her from a long line of GOP First Ladies who have quietly disagreed with their husbands over abortion, hoping to avoid jeopardizing the party’s support from the religious right.

Why has the otherwise silent Trump decided to speak out on this issue now? The state of the GOP may well have driven her to do so. We know this from the 1970s, the last time a Republican First Lady—Betty Ford—spoke out openly in support of women’s rights. Both then and now, the Republican party was undergoing an ideological reconfiguration, one which widened the gender gap. That opened up space for the First Lady to speak out on abortion without fear of damaging her husband’s chances in November. Trump's comments therefore tell us as much about the state of the GOP as they do about abortion.

By the 1970s, the battle for the soul of the Republican Party was decades old. Conservatives had spent years building a movement to oppose the dominant brand of moderate Republicanism most associated with President Dwight Eisenhower and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Throughout the 1960s, rising conservatives, most especially Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, challenged the party’s orthodoxy. 

With the collapse of the Nixon Administration after Watergate and the decision by new President Gerald Ford to pardon his predecessor, the Republican Party found itself in crisis. Ford had to contend with leading Southern and Western Republicans pushing the party rightward as he attempted to navigate a way out of the national spiritual nadir. Women within the party were also engaged in a fierce battle, with conservative activists like Phylis Schlafly rising to the fore and demanding the party shed its historic support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), legal abortion, and other feminist aims — and instead become the party of traditional conservative family values. The new First Lady, Betty Ford, was squarely on the opposite side of this debate.

Read More: Melania Trump Shares Her Views on Abortion in New Interview—and Donald's Reaction

As the GOP underwent this fundamental identity crisis, abortion emerged as a core issue dividing the party.   

It was in this context in August 1975 that Betty Ford sat down with 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer. He observed that abortion was “kind of a taboo subject for the wife of the President.” Despite that, however, Safer wanted to know what Ford thought about the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which ruled that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to have an abortion under some circumstances. Ford dismissed the idea that First Ladies shouldn't tackle the tough issue, instead remarking that she felt “very strongly that it was the best thing in the world when the Supreme Court voted to legalize abortion.”

Knowing that the answer would infuriate the rising GOP right, the Ford Administration attempted to distinguish the First Lady’s views from those of the President and the Republican Party by noting that this was her own personal opinion. President Ford admitted to reporters after the interview aired that he anticipated losing millions of votes as a result of his wife’s comments, but he largely tried to remain neutral. The First Lady’s comments prompted a swift backlash, with Mormon Elder Gordon B. Hinckley, for one, condemning the interview in a CBS broadcast as part of a wider “deterioration of morality around the world.”

The First Lady, however, wasn’t interested in ceding ground. She had a very different vision for the GOP. She wanted to see ratification of the ERA and protection for abortion rights. Mrs. Ford was not alone in this regard. She had the support of a cohort of Republican feminists including RNC co-chair Mary Dent Crisp.

Yet, the tectonic plates of the party were already shifting. Betty Ford’s brand of bipartisan feminism was already becoming increasingly unfashionable. Republican feminists felt power slipping away as Ronald Reagan mounted a challenge for the Republican nomination in 1976. By 1980, when Reagan secured control of the GOP, Crisp was ousted from her position and ended up running John Anderson’s independent presidential campaign.

Betty Ford kept pushing for women’s equality even after her husband lost in 1976, but her brand of moderate Republicanism waned as the 1970s progressed. Reagan’s ascendency solidified the shift of the GOP to the right. Abortion remained front and center as a political issue—not just a women’s issue—as the Reagan Revolution reshaped the American political landscape. 

In 1980, for the first time in 40 years, the GOP dropped support of the ERA from its platform. The battle to ratify the Amendment fizzled out, even after Congress extended the deadline to 1982. As moderates left the party, Reagan courted the newly organized Christian Right and First Lady Nancy Reagan followed suit. 

The new First Lady personally opposed abortion but quietly supported women’s right to make the choice for themselves. Yet Mrs. Reagan refused to make this declaration in public, knowing that such a stance would enrage her husband’s Evangelical supporters. In 1984, when a Los Angeles Times reporter asked her about exceptions to allow abortion in instances of rape, Nancy Reagan replied, “I don’t know.” This response forced her staff to clarify that the First Lady “had no obligation to explain her position further, because she is not an elected official or a person seeking office.” It was not until 1994—years after her husband had left the White House—that she made her personal opinions on the matter known.

Read More: Roe v. Wade Lawyer 'Amazed' Americans Still Fighting Over Abortion

Reagan’s successor, Barbara Bush, also obscured her pro-abortion-rights position during her husband’s presidency. When pressed on the issue during his 1992 reelection campaign, she dodged, instead stating that abortion was a personal choice and that the issue should not be in the party platform “either pro or con.” Her statement shocked activists on either side of the issue. Pro-abortion-rights activists denounced it as a deliberate play to prevent liberal voters from defecting from the GOP while conservatives attempted to play Mrs. Bush's stance down, wary that it would cost her husband votes from the right.

Bush’s daughter-in-law, Laura Bush, did go on the record stating that she did not believe that the Roe decision should be overturned in an interview the day before her own husband’s inauguration in 2001 but largely abstained from discussing abortion since “I’m not running.” All three women’s husbands maintained staunch anti-abortion positions and pushed anti-abortion policies.

The silence of the three Republican First Ladies stemmed from the alliance of the GOP with the Christian Right, which left minimal space for them to support abortion access as loudly as Betty Ford had done. Additionally, with Roe protecting these rights, it may have been easier to justify not speaking out as loudly.

Melania Trump similarly said nothing about abortion rights during her husband’s presidency. But in 2022, the Supreme Court reshaped the debate over women's reproductive health by overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—a direct result of appointments made by Trump's husband. The decision eliminated the constitutional right to have an abortion, and hurt the GOP in the 2022 midterm elections. Donald Trump has worked to muddy his stance on the issue, even claiming he would veto a national abortion ban.

This changing GOP climate created a space for Melania Trump’s voice to be heard on abortion. Just as the party underwent a period of demographic reconfiguration in the 1970s, the current GOP is at a pivotal moment where it is transforming from the Republican Party that existed from the 1980s to 2020s — a party of traditional conservatism and moral values — to the GOP of Donald Trump the individual. 

Melania speaking out may well be an attempt to sway undecided voters who are not social conservatives but remain unconvinced by the Democratic establishment and open to a potentially loosely ideologically defined Trumpism. It’s also a bid to try and capture women’s vote at a time when, after Dobbs, the gender gap is wider than ever. Her stance on abortion is a reminder to voters that not only are reproductive rights on the ballot in November, but so too is the future of the Republican Party itself.

Elizabeth Rees is a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History in Dallas, Texas. Her DPhil research, completed at the University of Oxford, investigates the development of the East Wing Staff and the Office of the First Lady in the mid-20th century.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.