In one of his most bizarre interviews in recent memory, Donald Trump insisted abortion is “not that big of an issue,” claimed Republicans are the “party of fertilization” and said every legal scholar in the world supported overturning Roe v. Wade.
During an interview last week with a local Michigan TV station 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 aftermath of the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Recent polling shows many voters see the 2024 election as a high-stakes election for the future of abortion and contraception access. President Joe Biden has made the issue central to his campaign, as have countless Democratic candidates.
“I think the abortion issue should be largely taken off the table because the individual states are doing what they’re doing,” the GOP presidential hopeful said.
“It’s really not that big of an issue,” he added.
Trump suggested it was actually a good thing for women that the 6-3 conservative-led court overturned a 50-year precedent guaranteeing women a constitutional right to abortion. He put three of those conservative justices onto 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’s working out,” he said. “For many, many years, people have said we’ve got to bring this back to the states to decide, and that’s now working.”
Trump also called the GOP the “party of fertilization,” apparently trying to make the case that Republicans have fought to ensure women’s access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF. But not only is that false, he lost that point completely in an indecipherable word salad.
“We want to help the women because they were going to end fertilization, which is where, when the IVF, where women go to the clinics and they get help in having a baby, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And we’re for it a 100%. They tried to say that they weren’t for it. They actually weren’t for it and aren’t for it as much as us, but women see that,” he said.
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Republicans in Congress have long opposed 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 a frozen embryo is “a child,” a decision resulting in IVF clinics halting their services around the state because they didn’t want to face prosecution or lawsuits by discarding unused embryos. Alabama Republican legislators soon scrambled to pass a new law to give IVF clinics immunity from lawsuits, but they did not take up a bill to revisit the state’s legal status of embryos.
Elsewhere in the interview, Trump falsely claimed that women routinely have abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy, said women are somehow having abortions after the ninth month and are able to “kill the baby after the baby is born,” and that “every legal scholar … all over the world” supported overturning Roe v. Wade.
“You have to understand, every legal scholar from all over the country, all over the world, they said, ‘You have to get abortion out of the federal government, you have to take it away from the federal government, give it to the states,’ and now that’s what we’ve been able to do,” he boasted of throwing out Roe v. Wade. “We’ve given it to the states, and some states have already decided, and people are satisfied with it.”
Trump has made this claim before, and legal scholars have shot it down as “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.”
“Most legal scholars, like most Americans, didn’t want Roe overturned,” Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, told FactCheck.org last month. “We can name any number of professors who submitted briefs to SCOTUS asking Roe not to be overturned.”
