Former President Trump says he has “no regrets” that his handpicked Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion.
“The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue. It’s being solved at the state level, and people are very happy about it,” Trump said in an interview with CBS News. “No regrets, no. I wouldn’t have regrets. I did something most people felt was undoable.”
The former president has repeatedly boasted about his role in ending Roe v. Wade, even as he and the Republican Party have broadly tried to stay away from engaging on such a divisive issue.
Abortion has galvanized Democrats in the two years since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision overturned Roe, and Trump has struggled with whether to embrace or downplay his role in the matter.
Democrats are campaigning on protecting abortion rights, and Vice President Harris, their presidential nominee, has been the administration’s point person on reproductive rights. Harris has pledged to fight to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade across all states.
Trump has settled on the position that abortion policy is up to the states, taking credit for ending Roe and falsely claiming that “all legal scholars, all Democrats, all Republicans” have been trying to let the states decide their own abortion policies for 52 years.
In fact, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think Roe should have been preserved and support access to abortion.
Trump has characterized the 2022 Dobbs decision as something that unified the country, allowing voters in every state to decide whether they want to ban abortion outright, after a certain number of weeks, or protect it.
In the aftermath of the ruling, abortion regulation is an ever-changing patchwork. Nationwide, 14 states have banned abortion, and half a dozen others have implemented gestational restrictions from six weeks to 15 weeks.
Amendments to protect abortion have won in every state where they’ve been on the ballot, but many of the states that have banned abortion outright don’t allow people to vote on the issue.
And even in states that do allow ballot measures, conservative state lawmakers and activists have been working the levers of governmental power to keep abortion rights off the ballot or complicate the process.
In the CBS interview, Trump also said he would not enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that anti-abortion activists want to use to justify a nationwide ban on abortion pills and potentially any medical instrument that could be used in an abortion.
“No. We will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no, I would not,” Trump said.
The law prohibits the shipment of “every article or thing designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion.”
Anti-abortion activists, working with former Trump administration officials, have been laying the groundwork for the next Republican administration to apply the Comstock Act to prevent the mailing of any abortion drugs and materials, effectively banning all abortions without needing Congress to act.
Trump said medication abortion “is going to be available” because the Supreme Court said it should be.
The court, however, did not rule that the pills should remain available. The justices merely dismissed a challenge to their legality because the people bringing the lawsuit did not have standing.
The court left the door open to other legal challenges, including from a trio of red states in front of the same Trump-appointed federal judge who initially suspended mifepristone’s approval in 2023.
