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As a matter of politics, Donald Trump’s comment that women who have abortions should suffer “some form of punishment” was a disaster. As a matter of intellectual and moral consistency, Trump’s got a point — one that exposes a fundamental tension in the Republican Party between its assertion that life begins at conception and the legal and moral implications of that absolutist view. (Ruth Marcus, 3/31)

This is almost always true: A woman who aborts a child is operating within an emotional and spiritual context of fear, disappointment, confusion and sadness. If she receives an illegal abortion she should not be “punished” by the law. This is in line with long human tradition and is based on the simple wisdom that she has already been gravely and tragically penalized: She has lost her child, someone who was very likely going to love her, someone she very likely would have loved. The doctor who performs such an abortion on the other hand is not in turmoil, he is in business. He breaks the law and ends the life of the child with full consciousness, and for profit. He should be “punished.” He should be in jail. That we even have to discuss this is absurd. (Peggy Noonan, 3/31)

This campaign season has offered an unexpected form of reality television entertainment: Watching the light of discovery and calculation in Donald Trump’s eyes when he is presented with difficult policy issues, apparently for the very first time. Abortion is the current case in point. In the late 1990s, Trump supported the legality of partial-birth abortion. For a few hours on Wednesday, he endorsed criminal sanctions against women who have abortions. (Michael Gerson, 3/31)

Although people’s views on abortion ultimately turn on their fundamental beliefs about the nature and beginnings of human life, there has always been a logical flaw in the antiabortion case. If abortion is the taking of a human life — knowingly and purposefully — how can it not be a crime for a woman to procure one? If a doctor who performs an abortion is little better than a murderer for hire, how can you punish the doctor and let the patient go free? Few antiabortion activists have troubled to ponder this anomaly. (Michael Kinsley, 3/31)

In his latest gambit to capture the news cycle, Donald Trump said Wednesday that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who abort. (His Director of Retractions shortly thereafter issued a clarification.) The Republican front-runner's misguided notion contradicts historical legal strategies and is contrary to the long-held policies of state and national pro-life organizations. Before the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade — which legalized abortion for any reason, at any time of pregnancy — state abortion laws targeted abortionists (those who performed abortions), not women. (Clarke D. Forsythe, 3/31)

The good news is that some pro-life and pro-choice groups have found common ground. The bad news is that it took Donald Trump threatening to prosecute pregnant women for exercising their constitutional right to abortion. That position, expressed to Chris Matthews on Wednesday’s MSNBC town hall, was reversed within hours in e-mails to the press. Someone in Trump’s campaign (probably not his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski) must have pointed out to him that even the farthest right of the right wing hasn’t gone as far as he did in penalizing women: Not Ted Cruz, not Mike Huckabee, not even Rick Santorum. They’ve limited themselves to advocating prosecution for abortion providers. (Rekha Basu, 4/1)

This week, Donald Trump stumbled upon the one position on abortion that almost everyone can hate: He endorsed not only criminal bans on abortion but also punishment for women who choose to terminate a pregnancy. “There has to be some form of punishment,” Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews during a Wednesday town hall. He quickly retracted his statement, but the backlash from all corners against his comment deserves some attention. If the antiabortion movement believes abortion is murder, why does almost no one want to punish women who terminate their pregnancies? The answer can be found in the messy history of criminal punishment and abortion. Whether abortion has been legal or illegal, Americans have long been reluctant to send women to jail for having one. (Mary Ziegler, 4/1)

Both Republicans and Democrats are blasting GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump for his statement, since retracted, that women who seek abortions should face “some form of punishment.” But how different is Trump's original position from the real-world impact of laws and proposals supported by his two Republican presidential opponents, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich? (3/31)