The Republican National Committee adopted former President Donald Trump’s policy platform on Monday ahead of the party’s convention next week, including his preferred position that abortion laws be left up to the state and excluding the call for a federal abortion ban for the first time in 40 years. 

The RNC’s platform committee approved the 16-page document outlining a vision for Trump’s second administration as the presumptive GOP nominee has distanced himself from Project 2025, a more detailed and hard-right undertaking by allies and former members of his first administration that Democrats have widely publicized in their critiques of Trump’s plans. 

“We are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE. Our future, our identity, and our very way of life are under threat like never before,” the document’s preamble reads. “President Trump and the Republican Party led America out of the pessimism induced by decades of failed leadership, showing us that the American People want Greatness for our Country again.”

“Yet after nearly four years of the Biden administration, America is now rocked by Raging Inflation, Open Borders, Rampant Crime, Attacks on our Children, and Global Conflict, Chaos, and Instability,” the document continues.

The policy platform mentions the word “abortion” once, on its 15th page, and attempts to boast of Republicans being responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade, while emphasizing that laws regulating abortion should be left to the states, a case Trump has made as abortion restrictions have grown increasingly unpopular since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022.

“We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights,” the document reads. “After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”

The Biden campaign and Democrats argued that Trump’s previous statements and stances, as well as his alliances with anti-abortion groups and advocates, are a more telling depiction of what his abortion policies will be in a second term than the platform he presents to general election voters.

“Donald Trump has made it clear with his own words and actions what he will do if he regains power – rip away women’s freedoms, punish women, and ban abortion nationwide,” Biden campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Trump himself said that women should be punished for having an abortion, that doctors should be criminalized for doing their jobs, and that he’s ‘looking at’ restrictions on birth control. Despite Trump and his team’s best efforts, the American people are clear on just how far he would go to rip away their freedoms – and they’ll vote accordingly this November.”

Since he first ran for president in 2016, Trump has publicly both agreed and disagreed with the notion that women and doctors should be punished for abortions, more recently saying in April that he would leave it up to the states to decide whether they would criminally penalize women who receive abortions and even monitor their pregnancies.

The platform committee began its meeting Monday, a week before the start of the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin where Trump is scheduled to accept his third straight nomination for president.

The platform is a statement of first principles traditionally written by party activists. In 2016, the platform included an endorsement of a 20-week national ban. There was no party platform in 2020. Trump had supported federal legislation in 2018 that would have banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, though the measure fell short of the necessary support in the Senate.

Ahead of the platform being adopted on Monday, many of Trump’s more vehemently anti-abortion allies urged him to keep a plank in the platform that expresses the Republican Party’s support for an "amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to children before birth,” a passage that has been included in every Republican Party platform since 1984.

“Most Americans tend to think of Donald Trump as a conservative, but what's been particularly interesting in this platform debate is that Trump and his allies are looking to move the Republican platform, at least on social and cultural issues, away from the right to the center,” said Dan Schnur, a professor at the University of California - Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. “The people, the activists who are most upset with him are not moderates, but rather the most ardent social conservatives in the party who see him backing away from their longtime goal of a federal ban on abortion policy.”

At least one of those allies, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser, signed onto a letter pushing Trump not to abandon the call for a national abortion ban, but conceded on Monday that the ultimate “mission of the pro-life movement, for the next four months, must be to defeat the Biden-Harris extreme abortion agenda.”

“It is important that the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” Dannefelser said in a statement. “Under this amendment, it is Congress that enacts and enforces its provisions. The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”

Others were not as pleased, particularly as the platform drafting and approval process has grown more insular and controlled by Trump campaign officials. Trump ally Russ Vought is serving as the policy director of the Republican Party’s platform writing committee while also leading the effort to draft the 180-day agenda for Project 2025, a sweeping proposal for remaking government that Trump said Friday he knew “nothing about” despite having several former aides involved.

“This never happened before. I’ve done this several times,” RNC platform committee member Gayle Ruzicka told a Wisconsin local TV news network after the committee met on Monday. “They didn’t allow any amendments, they didn’t allow any discussion. They rolled us.”

"I've never seen this happen before. I don't understand why they did it and I'm extremely disappointed that we do not have any pro-life language,” Ruzicka continued.