Donald Trump said he would vote against an amendment to Florida’s state constitution guaranteeing abortion rights, raising the stakes on an issue that is mobilising Democrats and threatening his White House bid.
The former Republican president had sent mixed signals and avoided taking a stance on the proposed amendment, which will appear on the state ballot in November’s election.
But on Friday, he told Fox News that he would be voting “no” on the measure, which would protect abortion rights until viability and negate a law signed by Republican governor Ron DeSantis in Trump’s home state that bans abortions after six weeks of gestation.
Trump said that while he disagreed with a six-week ban because “you need more time”, Democrats had “radical” policies on abortion. “It is just a ridiculous situation where you can do an abortion in the ninth month,” he said.
The former president has been caught between the need to maintain the support of staunchly conservative, religious voters who are opposed to abortion, and the political imperative of winning over moderate and independent voters who favour abortion rights.
Trump and other Republicans have been on the defensive over abortion ever since the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, including three justices he appointed during his presidency, overturned the right to an abortion nationally in 2022. That has prompted Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country to pass increasingly strict abortion laws, including the six-week abortion ban in Florida.
Opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans oppose such strict measures, and Democrats, including Trump’s rival in the race for the White House, US vice-president Kamala Harris, have relentlessly pounded Trump on abortion rights — and raised concerns that other reproductive practices, including in vitro fertilisation and contraception, could be at risk if he is re-elected.
Earlier this week, Trump had scrambled to say that he would ensure funding for IVF procedures, and on Thursday he had suggested that in Florida he would vote to make sure that abortion was not limited to the first six weeks of pregnancy.
But that comment triggered a backlash from the right, forcing him to clarify his position opposing the amendment on Friday.
Harris said in a statement that with his comments on Friday to Fox News, Trump had “just made his position on abortion very clear: he will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant”.
“I trust women to make their own healthcare decisions and believe the government should never come between a woman and her doctor,” Harris added.
Trump’s struggles to define his positions on reproductive rights come after his campaign attacked Harris for changing stances on a number of issues, including healthcare, energy and immigration, in order to appeal to centrist voters.
Trump’s latest comments on abortion came hours before he was set to address a national conference for Moms for Liberty, a conservative women’s group, in Washington. The Florida-based political organisation was formed to protest Covid-19 pandemic mask and vaccine mandates and now advocates to stop public schools from teaching about LGBT+ identities and structural racism, among other issues.
Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, told the Financial Times earlier on Friday that Trump “really understands and cares about parents and parental rights” and urged anyone who had “an issue” with his stance on abortion to look at the Democratic party’s positions.
“Just wait until you see what the Harris-[Tim] Walz ticket, how anti-life they are,” Justice said. “People need to understand, we need to move our country forward, we need to unite to do that, and if there is anything that we can come together on, it should be our children and their health and safety and development.”
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