What Trump really said about abortion
During the 2024 presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump boasted that he would "come together with all groups" on abortion and "negotiate something" that would "make both sides happy." According to Trump, the country will "end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years."
On Monday, Trump unveiled his plan in a video uploaded to his social media platform, Truth Social. And his plan is to do nothing.
Trump declared that "states will determine by vote or legislation" how much to restrict abortion and "whatever they decide must be the law of the land — in this case, the law of the state." Trump acknowledged that "[many] states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks or some will have more conservative than others," but regardless, "that’s what they will be." This is less of a plan, than a description of the status quo after the Supreme Court, stocked with Justices nominated by Trump, overturned Roe v. Wade.
In the statement, Trump sought to position himself as somewhat moderate on the issue, saying he was “strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.” But many states that currently have abortion bans in place do not include these exceptions. So Trump is explicitly supporting state bans with no restrictions for rape or incest. In many cases, these bans also make it difficult for pregnant women to obtain an abortion even when their health is at extreme risk.
For example, Texas’ abortion ban does not include exceptions for rape or incest, and a “doctor convicted of providing an illegal abortion in Texas can face up to 99 years in prison, a $100,000 fine and lose their medical license.” Texas’ abortion law also allows any citizen to file civil suits against those who they believe either performed an abortion or helped someone receive one. While Texas’ abortion ban does provide “narrow exemptions for the life and health of pregnant people,” multiple people have sued the state after being denied an abortion despite facing serious health risks. Due to the language of the ban, doctors have reportedly been hesitant to perform an abortion, even when a woman's life is in danger.
In November, the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments in Zurawski v. Texas. The lawsuit involves “20 women [who] allege they were denied medical care for their complicated pregnancies as a result of the state’s abortion laws.” Amanda Zurawski experienced complications after her water broke around 18-weeks of pregnancy, but her doctor refused to induce labor even though “a miscarriage was inevitable.” Zurawski was only able to receive an abortion after she developed sepsis. Due to the infection, Zurawski “will suffer lasting effects to her fertility” including “the permanent closure of one of her fallopian tubes and a collapsed uterus.”
In Oklahoma, performing an abortion or helping someone obtain an abortion is considered a “felony crime punishable by up to five years in prison." The law does not include exceptions for rape or incest. The only exception is a life-threatening medical emergency. Oklahoma’s abortion ban also allows people to file civil suits if someone is “aiding and abetting an abortion.”
In September 2023, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed legal actions on behalf of pregnant women “who were denied abortions despite dangerous pregnancy complications” in Idaho, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. The suit cited an instance in Oklahoma where a woman, Jaci Statton, “was turned away from an Oklahoma emergency room despite having a partial molar pregnancy,” which is non-viable and “requires urgent care.”
“Oklahoma’s laws nearly killed me. Even though I had an extremely dangerous pregnancy and was repeatedly bleeding, I was told to wait in a hospital parking lot until I was near death in order to get the life-saving care I needed,” Statton said, adding that she had to “travel almost 200 miles out of state for care.”
Louisiana’s strict abortion ban does not include exceptions for rape or incest. The law, which went into effect after Roe was overturned, only allows abortion “if there is substantial risk of death or impairment to the patient in continuing the pregnancy,” or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality.
According to the AP, “Louisiana has “one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country, with Black women disproportionately impacted.” A report by NPR found that because of Louisiana’s abortion ban, “pregnant women have been given risky, unnecessary surgeries, denied swift treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, and forced to wait until their life is at risk before getting an abortion.”
Trump is attempting to avoid alienating moderate suburbanites by keeping things vague and not affirmatively endorsing further restrictions on the national level. But Trump also sent some unmistakable signals to his anti-abortion base. First, Trump reminded them that he was “proudly the person responsible” for overturning Roe. Then Trump suggested that he was simply embracing the position that would allow him to be victorious in November. "You must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country,” Trump said.
What Trump didn't say
Trump’s recent statement on abortion contains some key omissions. First, Trump does not specify whether or not he would sign a national abortion ban if it landed on his desk as president. On February 19, the New York Times reported that Trump privately “told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban.” Within a matter of weeks, Trump began publicly suggesting that he’s open to an even more extreme 15-week national abortion ban. He informed Fox News viewers in an interview on February 29 that “[m]ore and more, I’m hearing 15 weeks” and in a radio appearance on March 19 said that “[t]he number of weeks now, people are agreeing on 15. And I’m thinking in terms of that.”
Additionally, while Trump’s statement suggests he would support abortion access in states “where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” he fails to say how he plans to vote on an upcoming abortion ballot initiative in his adopted home state of Florida. Currently, a six-week abortion ban is set to take effect in Florida beginning on May 1. But, this month, the state’s Supreme Court approved a ballot question that will give Florida voters, including Trump, the chance to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution come November.
Trump also declared that he “strongly support[s] the availability of IVF,” but did not endorse federal protections for IVF. In February, a spokesperson for Trump “twice declined to say whether Trump would support a national law ensuring all Americans have the right to access IVF treatments.” This position is largely in lockstep with his party and allies: Senate Republicans claiming to care about IVF recently gutted a bill that would have “safeguard[ed] access to IVF nationwide.” And over 100 GOP members “have signed onto so-called personhood legislation with no carve-out for embryos in clinics, which, if enacted, would upend how the procedure is practiced in the United States,” Politico reports.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, which is spearheading the Project 2025 Trump presidency playbook, has been “strategizing how to convince not just GOP officials but evangelicals broadly that they should have serious moral concerns about fertility treatments like IVF and that access to them should be curtailed.”
Critically, Trump did not address how a Trump FDA would approach abortion pills, which are the most common way pregnancies are terminated. In recent years, anti-abortion activists have ramped up their attacks on abortion pills. Project 2025 declares abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children,” Rolling Stone reports. The pro-Trump playbook outlines a plan to “rescind FDA approval for the abortion pill if they regain control of the White House in 2024” and calls upon the CDC to “collect data about who had abortions and where — and punish any states that refuse to share that information.”
It also advocates using the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law from the 1800s, to argue that mailing abortion pills is illegal. Trump allies, the New York Times reports, are quietly eyeing this strategy in lieu of a federal abortion ban. In fact, Jonathan F. Mitchell, a Trump attorney and the architect of Texas’ abortion ban, says he “hope[s] he [Trump] doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth.”
What Trump lied about
At several points in his video statement on abortion, Trump lies. The former president falsely claims that Democrats support abortions “beyond the ninth month” and “execution after birth.” This is not the first time Trump has peddled these absurd lies. Since as early as 2019, Trump has falsely claimed that physicians are killing babies after birth and has used this debunked claim to argue that Democrats are the “Party of late term abortion.”
Most recently, in September 2023, Trump repeated this claim eight separate times during his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Trump said that “Democrats are able to kill the baby after birth” and that there are “some states that are allowed to kill the child after birth,” among other baseless assertions. But, as HuffPost reported at the time, “[i]t is not legal in a single state to willfully end the life of a newborn.” Previous fact checks of Trump have also shown that late-term abortions are “very rare,” and generally involve extreme medical circumstances.
Trump also inaccurately claims that “all legal scholars” on “both sides” wanted to overturn Roe. But multiple law professors told CNN that this assertion is “mind-numbingly false” and “flatly incorrect.” Many legal scholars advocated strengthening and expanding the protections of Roe. Trump also said that “everybody” wanted abortion laws to be determined by states. Polling data, CNN notes, shows that “a large majority of Americans did not want Roe terminated.”
All Trump did with this announcement is piss off the evangelical absolutists that are demanding a national ban, now they think they can't trust him (as if these assholes ever should have). As Judd notes, he didn't say a damn thing about vetoing national bans, pulling mifepristone from the market, IVF, contraception and all the rest. Democrats need to continue to run ads day and night, in all 50 states, simply showing Trump bragging about packing SCOTUS with RWRNJs and killing Roe. It will get him zero votes that he isn't already gonna get, and it will help galvanize women and other sentient beings against him.
All this talk about what Trump did or did not say is accurate (thank you as always for your excellent reporting) but we are still treating him like a “regular candidate” and not as someone who lied over 30000 times during his presidency. “Known liar says …” could be the headline for all these stories.