Trump says a national abortion ban is ‘off the table.’ Seconds later, he says ‘we’ll see what happens’
Trump and his running mate have both offered range of views on a potential national abortion ban
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Donald Trump continues to offer vague answers about what the state of abortion law would look like under a potential Trump administration.
During an interview on Sunday with Fox News, the former president said that a national abortion ban was “off the table,” while leaving open the possibility that states might impose new restrictions on abortion care.
“It something that’s off the table because I did something that everybody wanted to do,” Trump said.
“I was able to get it back to the states,” he continued, referring to how Trump-appoint justices were crucial in the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional abortion protections of Roe v Wade.
“Now, we’ll see what happens,” the former president concluded.
The decision paved the way for 14 states to now have near-total abortion bans, despite more than 60 percent of Americans supporting abortion being legal in all or most cases.
Trump’s comments on Sunday are the latest bit of confusion about where he and his campaign stand on abortion.
Vice president JD Vance has sought to assure voters that Trump would veto any proposed national abortion ban, though the Ohio Senator also admitted during the vice presidential debate that Republicans have to work on “earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly, just don’t trust us.”
Earning that trust may prove difficult, as both candidates have been all over the map in their public statements.
In August, for instance, Trump expressed both his opposition and support for a proposed Florida ban on abortion after six weeks.
Muddying the waters further, former first lady Melania Trump has come out strongly for abortion rights in her new memoir, describing them as part of “a woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty.”
“We spoke about it. And I said, you have to write what you believe. I’m not going to tell you what to do. You have to write what you believe,” the former president recently told Fox News of the content of the memoir. “But I said you have to stick with your heart. I’ve said that to everybody, you have to go with your heart.”
Vance, for his part, said during the debate he “never supported a national abortion ban” but instead supported “some minimum national standard,” even though he told a 2022 podcast he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
The Harris campaign has made abortion a central part of its attacks on Trump, referring to state restrictions on abortion as “Trump abortion bans.”
“And we know that women have died because of Trump abortion bans. I was with a mother and the two sisters of a woman who died because of Trump abortion bans just last night,” the vice president told a crowd in September.
“Women are being denied care during miscarriages, some only being treated once they develop sepsis,” Harris said.
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