Has Trump always been anti-abortion? We did some digging
President Donald Trump rose to power by campaigning on a conservative agenda, including the promise to appoint an anti-abortion judge to the Supreme Court. But has the president always felt this way?
Today, January 19th, at the anti-abortion March for Life in Washington, D.C. Trump condemned the United States’ abortion laws.
"As you all know, Roe v. Wade has resulted in some of the most permissive abortion laws anywhere in the world," Trump said.
He continued by citing the fact that the U.S. is one of seven countries to allow abortions after 20 weeks.
"It is wrong. It has to change," he concluded.
And throughout his first year as president, Trump has enacted anti-abortion policies. In April, he ended federal funding for Planned Parenthood. In October, the Trump administration attempted to block two undocumented teens from getting abortions. And most recently, the president created a new division of the Department of Health and Human Services to protect doctors who have religious objections providing the procedure.
https://twitter.com/udfredirect/status/954423170299199488
However, a 1999 episode of Meet the Press paints a different picture. The star of The Apprentice said that he would not ban late-term abortion as a president.
"I am pro-choice in every respect and as far as it goes," Trump said at the time.
Trump even co-sponsored an abortion rights fundraising dinner 10 years earlier, in 1989, although he was not actually present at the event itself.
And a clip from the Howard Stern Show reveals that when Trump found out that his second wife Marla Maples was pregnant (when they were dating), he asked, “Well, what are we going to do about this?” Although Trump didn’t clarify what he meant by this comment, his words don’t inspire confidence that he was pro-life at the time.
Donald Trump on abortion in 2004: pic.twitter.com/9mqeahXm5X
— Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) January 19, 2018
Trump first declared himself pro-life to the New York Times in 2011 and has continued to reiterate that position ever since. But it’s clear that Trump’s position has changed drastically over the years. People change their positions all the time, but it feels hypocritical for Trump to campaign on an anti-abortion platform and ignore that he used to be pro-choice. In the end, only an individual woman can decide if abortion is the right choice for her, and we hope that our government will realize that.
