In one of his most bizarre interviews in recent memory: Donald Trump insisted that abortion “isn’t that big of a deal,” claimed that Republicans are the “party of conception” and said every legal scholar in the world supported overturning Roe v. Wade.
During an interview last week with a local TV station in Michigan FOX-2 Detroit, Trump repeatedly downplayed the significance of abortion rights on the national stage – despite it being a driving factor in Democrats’ strong performance at the ballot box in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Roe v. Wade decision.
Recent polls show that many voters see the 2024 election as a high-stakes election for the future of abortion and access to contraception. President Joe Biden has made the issue central to his campaign, as have numerous Democratic candidates.
“I think the abortion issue should be largely taken off the table because the individual states are doing what they are doing,” the Republican presidential hopeful said.
“It’s actually not that big of a deal,” he added.
Trump suggested that it was actually a good thing for women that the 6-3 conservative-led court overturned a fifty-year precedent guaranteeing women a constitutional right to abortion. He put three of those conservative justices on the court when he was president.
“I say what the people decide, and whatever it is, it’s within the state and what the people decide, and it works out,” he said. “For years, people have said we need to take this back to the states to make a decision on this, and it’s working now.”
Trump also called the Republican Party the “party of conception,” apparently in an effort to emphasize that Republicans have fought to ensure women’s access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). But that’s not just falsehe completely lost that point in an indecipherable word salad.
“We want to help the women because they would end the fertilization, and that’s where, with IVF, women go to the clinics and get help having a baby, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And we are 100% for it. They tried to say they weren’t for it. They actually weren’t for it and aren’t as for it as we are, but women see that,” he said.
Republicans in Congress have been against it for a long time women’s access to IVF. The only reason it’s getting national attention now — and that Trump is talking about it — is because the Alabama Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that a frozen embryo is “a child,” a decision that has led IVF clinics to cut their services into the entire state because she didn’t want to face prosecution or lawsuits by throwing away unused embryos. Republican lawmakers in Alabama quickly rushed to pass a new law give IVF clinics immunity from lawsuitsbut they have not passed a bill to reconsider the state’s legal status of embryos.
Elsewhere in the interview: Trump falseclaimed that women routinely have abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy, women said somehow abortions after the ninth month and are able to “kill the baby after the baby is born,” and that “every legal scholar… around the world” supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“You have to understand that every legal scholar from all over the country, all over the world, said, ‘You have to take abortion out of the federal government, you have to take it away from the federal government, give it to the federal government. says, “and now we’ve been able to do that,” he boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade. “We gave it to the states, and some states have already decided, and the people are happy with it.”
Trump has made this claim before, and legal scholars have dismissed it as “complete nonsense” and “patently absurd.”
“Most legal scholars, like most Americans, did not want Roe to be overturned,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. FactCheck.org last month. “We could name any number of professors who submitted briefs to SCOTUS asking that Roe not be overturned.”
