During a Wednesday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump unambiguously said he supports a federal abortion ban, adding, “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who end a pregnancy once a ban is implemented.
“You have to ban it,” Trump said, referring to abortion.
Now that his comments have been condemned by people across the political spectrum, Trump is attempting to walk things back. But his efforts to do so are contradicting not only what Trump said on MSNBC, but also with anti-abortion views he laid out earlier in his campaign.
In a statement released Wednesday, Trump articulated a position very different than the one he laid out for Matthews, though he denied his stance had changed. The doctors who perform abortions are the ones who should be punished for performing abortions, Trump said, rather than the women who receive them. He also said the abortion issue “is unclear and should be put back into the states for determination” — a position in direct contradiction not only with what he said Wednesday, but also with his clear support for a federal 20-week abortion ban last summer.
But on CNN Thursday morning, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson asserted Trump doesn’t really support a federal abortion ban after all.
“He never called for a ban on abortion,” Pierson said. “This was a discussion with Chris Matthews over a hypothetical ban, and in that discussion, when talking about potential consequences about doing something illegal, in this case an abortion, he said, yes, there should be consequences.”
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota pressed Pierson on the contradiction between Trump’s post-gaffe spin and what he actually said on Wednesday. Pierson responded by getting indignant about the line of questioning.
“This is absurd,” Pierson said. “There was a misspeak here, and you have a presidential candidate who clarified the record.”
Last summer, Trump said he supports the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a measure to ban abortions after 20 week in direct violation of the protections afforded under Roe v. Wade. The bill was blocked by Senate Democrats last September after being approved the House in 2014.
On Thursday, The Daily Beast published a harrowing story about how 20-week abortion bans can put women who live in one of the 12 states that have those laws on the books in horrible positions by forcing them to carry doomed pregnancies to term. Despite supporting efforts to implement that sort of ban on the federal level and his history of making crude comments about women, Trump has repeatedly said that “nobody has more respect for women” than he does.