On Monday, Donald Trump said he had “no regrets” about facilitating the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, which rescinded federal constitutional protections for reproductive autonomy and gave states free rein to ban abortion. “Democrats and Republicans—everybody wanted to do this for 52 years, and I got it done,” the former president and current GOP nominee said. “People are very happy about it.”
Clip via YouTube
Trump went on to describe abortion as “being solved at a state level,” an outcome that he said “all legal scholars, all Democrats, and all Republicans” wanted. Since Dobbs, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 14 states have started enforcing total abortion bans. Eight states now ban abortion at or before 18 weeks, and 19 ban abortion at some point after that. There are over 35 million women of reproductive age living in states with total bans or other abortion restrictions, including more than 15 million women of color.
Some bans lack exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest, forcing survivors to flee the state, carry their abusers’ child, or seek care and risk legal consequences. Other bans do not have exceptions based on diagnoses of lethal fetal anomalies, subjecting families who cannot afford to travel elsewhere to unimaginable pain and suffering. Still others limit doctors’ ability to provide abortion care to patients whose lives are in danger, requiring them to evacuate by helicopter to hospitals in states where lawmakers will not require them to bleed to death.
“I did something that was, most people felt, undoable,” Trump said. “I was able to bring it back to the state governments, and now the people are voting.” A Quinnipiac poll conducted several months before Dobbs showed that 63 percent of Americans agreed with Roe v. Wade, and a May 2024 Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans think overturning Roe was a “bad thing.” A July 2024 AP-NORC poll showed that 70 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Roughly one-third of voters say they will only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion, and over 80 percent of Americans say it is important that future Supreme Court nominees view abortion as they do.
On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump pledged that he would appoint justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe if he were elected. On Monday, when asked if he would release another shortlist of possible Supreme Court nominees should he become president again, Trump said that he planned to do so “over the next three or four weeks.” Sources close to Trump said the same thing a few months ago.
