In Donald Trump’s America, women’s constitutional right to an abortion is threatened.
“Our country now stands perilously close to a return to the dark days when women were forced to put their own lives at risk to get safe and legal abortion care.”
—Nancy Northup, Center for Reproductive Rights
The president-elect made that clear in an interview Sunday night with “60 Minutes,” in which he repeated his vow to appoint “pro-life” judges to the U.S. Supreme Court. Those judges, he said, could overturn the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade—which would in turn send the issue “back to the states.” These statements echoed ones he made on the campaign trail and during the final presidential debate.
Interviewer Lesley Stahl followed up: “But then some women won’t be able to get an abortion.”
To which Trump responded: “Yeah, well, they’ll perhaps have to go—they’ll have to go to another state.”
Watch the exchange below:
Confoundingly, Trump also asserted during the interview that the matter of same-sex marriage, decided by the court last year, “was already settled. It’s law.” Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
As Rewire wrote in 2015:
And Elisa Leilani Slattery explained in July in a blog for the Open Society Foundations:
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In the wake of Trump’s election, women’s health advocates promised to “hold the line” against the president-elect’s dangerous anti-choice ideas and the groups emboldened by his victory.
Fortunately, Rewire noted on Monday, “[t]here is currently no case in the pipeline that directly challenges either Roe‘s holding that abortion is a fundamental right, or Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s sloppy undue burden standard balancing that fundamental right against the state’s interest in both fetal life and protecting patients. At the moment, there’s also not a federal statute designed to prompt a potential challenge.”
However, journalist Jessica Mason Pieklo continued:
“Make no mistake: Donald Trump’s proposed policies pose a direct threat to the constitutional protections recognized by Roe v. Wade and resoundingly reaffirmed in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, last week. “Our country now stands perilously close to a return to the dark days when women were forced to put their own lives at risk to get safe and legal abortion care.”
“President-elect Trump has publicly pledged to overturn Roe,” she said, “and promised punishment for the one in three American women who will have an abortion in her lifetime. When a woman decides to end a pregnancy, she needs safe, high-quality care—not a prison sentence.”
Also in the “60 Minutes” interview, Trump appeared to walk back slightly his campaign pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but said he would immediately deport or incarcerate 2-3 million “criminal” undocumented immigrants once he takes office in January.