Trump Speaks Out on Florida Abortion Law After Much Flip-Flopping
Donald Trump came out against Florida’s Amendment 4 abortion measure on Friday following days of flip-flopping on the issue—and the broader state of reproductive rights.
Amendment 4 includes legislation that would bar the state from adopting further abortion restrictions and overturn its current six-week ban.
Earlier in week, Trump, a Florida voter, had distanced himself from that ban, calling it “too strict.” He reiterated that stance on Friday in an interview with Fox News during a campaign stop in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
“You need more time than six weeks,” the former president said. “I’ve disagreed with that right from the early primaries when I heard about it, I disagreed with it.”
But, he subsequently made clear, he doesn’t disagree enough to vote for Amendment 4. Trump further couched his position as in opposition to what he described as Democrats’ “radical” views on abortion and women’s bodily rights.
Trump Punts on Abortion in Announcement Sure to Anger Conservatives
Trump’s position on the issue came just days after his twice-removed in-law, supermodel Karlie Kloss, threw her support behind the initiative.
In an op-ed published by the Miami Herald, Kloss—who is married to Josh Kushner, brother of Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared—wrote in support of the ballot measure, writing that she’d seen “the impact of Florida’s abortion ban.”
“Most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks,” she explained, recounting “one of many” stories she has heard from those affected by the state’s stringent abortion laws.
Trump’s positions on reproductive rights have been hard to follow. For months he gloated about appointing the Supreme Court judges who helped dismantle the federal abortion protections offered by Roe v. Wade.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump seemed to support leaving abortion rights up to individual states—a stance that is broadly in sync with anti-abortion rights activists seeking to limit access to abortion and fertility treatments.
However, after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos are children under the law, threatening access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state, a number of Republicans came out in support of the fertility procedure. Just a few days ago—and again in an NBC interview on Friday—Trump pivoted to say that he would require insurance companies to pay for IVF costs to support “more babies.”
“We are doing something with IVF because, I mean, as you know, friends, it’s really worked out very well for a lot of people,” Trump said Thursday at an event in La Crosse, Wisconsin, according to The Guardian. “We wanna produce babies in this country, right?”
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