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Donald Trump rarely walks back from an extreme position, but even he is trying to take back his recent anti-abortion statement in light of how terrible it sounds.
In a recent Time interview, Trump was asked if he thinks states should be allowed to "monitor women's pregnancies" so they can know if they've gotten an abortion. He tried to dodge the question by saying it would be up to "the individual states" now that Roe v. Wade was overturned, then refused to say what he thought about several follow-up questions.
If Trump thought this worked at the time, he no longer seems so confident that he settled the issue, taking to social media over the weekend to clarify things in a typically unclarifying way.
“I never said that ’some states may choose to monitor women’s pregnancies to possibly prosecute for violating any abortion bans.’ This was made up by Democrats and the Fake News Media,” Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social.
(Again, he said precisely that. You can read the transcript here.)
“After 50 years, Abortion is now up to the States, where everybody, Republican and Democrat, plus all legal scholars and experts, have wanted it to be,” he said. “The people choose, and many States, like Ohio and Kansas, have chosen. Many others are in the process of choosing.”
Trump is a habitual liar, so we know by now not to take his denials as fact. To state the obvious, “everybody” isn’t happy about the loss of federal abortion rights and the patchwork of anti-abortion states that emerged as a result. But Trump’s denial is undercut by the following sentence. The vague statement that “abortion is now up to the states” implies that states, during a Trump presidency, would be given free rein to institute whatever draconian anti-abortion measures they want, including pregnancy surveillance.
So even if one were to argue that Trump wasn’t being suggestive with his comments — as in, saying states should monitor pregnancies — clearly he was being permissive of this — meaning officials, under a Trump administration, could monitor pregnancies. And that's what matters.
Trump’s hair-splitting underscores an obvious fact about his campaign: He’s trying to reap the benefits of opposing abortion rights without facing any of the backlash. But he could have easily said that setting up a Big Brother-like surveillance of women's pregnancies to punish women who may have gotten an abortion would go too far, and he didn't. After facing some pushback, he got angry, but he still didn't say that he would not allow that.
And that is all the answer you need.