Trump says abortion is a ‘simple situation that has now been worked out’
Former President Donald Trump continues to say that ending Roe v. Wade and letting states determine abortion’s status was ‘what everybody wanted.’
On April 23, former President Donald Trump gave an interview during which he touched on the topic of abortion. Trump said “the abortion thing” was a “very simple situation that has now been worked out.”
“For 52 years, they’ve been trying to get it back to the states. I was able to get it back to the states. Now all of the states are making their decision,” Trump told Philadelphia station 6abc/WPVI-TV’s Walter Perez.
Trump was referring to the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade, removing abortion’s status as a federal constitutional right.
The former president has repeatedly taken credit for reversing Roe and claimed that having states decide the legal status of abortion for themselves is something people on both sides of the political aisle support.
“The abortion issue has been really, largely taken off the table because when we did this, we did what both sides, everybody wanted, legal scholars wanted, everybody. They wanted to take abortion out of the federal system and put it into the states and we were able to do that when we terminated Roe v. Wade. Now, when you look at it, and you look at what’s happening all over the country now, states are voting. …It’s tailor-made and it’s really working out well for people and they’re very, very happy,” Trump told Perez.
In Ohio, one of the states Trump mentioned, 57% of voters last November approved an amendment to the state Constitution to protect abortion rights.
Advocates in Florida, Maryland, and New York have secured enough signatures to put abortion initiatives on the ballot in 2024, according to the Associated Press. Petition drives in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota are still gathering the required signatures.
Legal scholars have noted that Trump’s statement that their community as a whole supported overturning Roe is untrue.
“It’s an intellectually lazy statement, and demonstrably false,” Jessica Waters, a professor of justice, law, and criminology at American University, told the XYZ Independent in an email.
Kimberly Mutcherson, a law professor at Rutgers Law School, told CNN, “Any claim that all legal scholars wanted Roe overturned is mind-numbingly false.”
According to a Gallup poll taken in May 2023, 34% of Americans believe abortion should be legal under any circumstances.
Trump told Perez that he supports in vitro fertilization.
“We are totally for that because it helps women. We’re looking to help women. And they tried to pin that on us, and actually they were the ones causing problems. We are totally for IVF, the fertilization, and we are going to really run on it and run on it very hard,” he said.
Once Roe was reversed and states were given the right to make decisions about the legality of reproductive care, IVF was caught in the political crosshairs. On Feb. 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created through IVF should be considered children and that discarding them is a criminal act. Within days of the ruling, the Republican Party was scrambling to define its position on IVF.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, sent a memo to Republican Senate candidates instructing them to make clear that they support IVF.
