Trump says he will not sign a national abortion ban if reelected

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he arrives at the Atlanta airport on April 10, 2024, in Atlanta. / Credit: Megan Varner/Getty Images

CNA Staff, Apr 10, 2024 / 14:20 pm (CNA).

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he would not sign a national abortion ban if reelected to the office of the presidency in November. 

The Republican presidential candidate was at an event in Atlanta on Wednesday when a reporter asked him: “Would you sign a national abortion ban if Congress sent it to your desk?” 

“No,” Trump said in response. 

Asked by the reporter: “You wouldn’t sign it?” Trump responded again: “No.”

Trump had minutes earlier indicated that he disagreed with this week’s historic ruling at the Arizona Supreme Court. That court on Monday ruled that state law does not guarantee a right to an abortion and that an 1864 law prohibiting all abortions can take effect later this month.

Asked in Atlanta on Wednesday if that ruling “went too far,” Trump responded: “Yeah they did, and that will be straightened out.”

“I’m sure that the governor and everybody else are going to bring it back into reason and that’ll be taken care of, I think very quickly,” the former president said. 

Trump has been steadily positioning himself as more of a centrist on abortion in recent months. 

On Monday he said in a social media video that “at the end of the day” abortion law in the U.S. is “all about the will of the people” and that “now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.” 

Last September, meanwhile, he called Florida’s six-week abortion ban “a terrible thing” and “a terrible mistake.”

President Joe Biden, on the other hand, last month promised to support a law that would legalize abortion nationwide in response to the repeal of Roe v. Wade two years ago.