In one of his most bizarre interviews in recent memory, Donald Trump insisted abortion is “not that big of an issue,” claimed Republicans are the “party of fertilization” and said every legal scholar in the world supported overturning Roe v. Wade.
During women’s access to IVF. The only reason it’s getting national attention now ― and that Trump is talking about it ― is because the Alabama Supreme Court ruled earlier this year a frozen embryo is “a child,” a decision resulting in IVF clinics halting their services around the state because they didn’t want to face prosecution or lawsuits by discarding unused embryos. Alabama Republican legislators soon scrambled to pass a new law to give IVF clinics immunity from lawsuits, but they did not take up a bill to revisit the state’s legal status of embryos.
Elsewhere in the interview, Trump falsely claimed that women routinely have abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy, said women are somehow having abortions after the ninth month and are able to “kill the baby after the baby is born,” and that “every legal scholar … all over the world” supported overturning Roe v. Wade.
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“You have to understand, every legal scholar from all over the country, all over the world, they said, ‘You have to get abortion out of the federal government, you have to take it away from the federal government, give it to the states,’ and now that’s what we’ve been able to do,” he boasted of throwing out Roe v. Wade. “We’ve given it to the states, and some states have already decided, and people are satisfied with it.”
Trump has made this claim before, and legal scholars have shot it down as “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.”
“Most legal scholars, like most Americans, didn’t want Roe overturned,” Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, told FactCheck.org last month. “We can name any number of professors who submitted briefs to SCOTUS asking Roe not to be overturned.”
