Trump doesn’t rule out banning medication abortion nationwide

Former President Donald Trump said he is open to banning abortion medication if he’s elected to a second term in the White House in November.

Trump made the comment during an Aug. 8 news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club resort in Florida after NBC News reporter Garrett Haake asked him whether he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to “revoke access to mifepristone.” Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen used for both abortion and miscarriage care before 10 weeks’ gestation.

“Sure, you could do things that will be, would supplement, absolutely,” Trump said in response. “And those things are pretty open and humane. But you have to be able to have a vote. And all I want to do is give everybody a vote. And the votes are taking place right now as we speak. Yeah. But it’s a very good – there are many things on a humane basis that you can do outside of that, but you also have to give a vote and the people are going to have to decide.”

Project 2025, a plan for a transition to a new Republican presidency that Trump has claimed not to know about but that was assembled by the Heritage Foundation with the input of dozens of former Trump administration officials and aides, contains a call to ban mifepristone.

Project 2025 says,  “Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world” and says the FDA should “Reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.”

Trump’s vice presidential running mate Sen. J.D. Vance has worked to make it difficult to access mifepristone.

In January 2023, Vance was one of dozens of Republicans in both houses of Congress who signed a letter urging Attorney General Merrick Garland to enforce the Comstock Act, a law enacted in 1873 that Vance and the other GOP lawmakers claim makes it illegal to dispense abortion medication through the mail.

“The reckless distribution of abortion drugs by mail or other carriers to pregnant mothers who have not been examined in-person by a physician is not only dangerous and unsafe, it is criminal,” the letter reads. “We demand that you act swiftly and in accordance with the law, shut down all mail-order abortion operations, and hold abortionists, pharmacists, international traffickers, and online purveyors, who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws, accountable.”

Vance now claims he does not want to ban mifepristone nationwide. He sat for a series of interviews that aired Aug. 11 in which he said that Trump doesn’t want to ban medication abortion nationwide but instead wants states to decide abortion policy individually.

“President Trump won the nomination of the Republican Party. He said it to you, and he said it repeatedly, that his goal is not to block mifepristone,” Vance said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. “It’s to let states make the decision on abortion policy.”

Bash said that states that have near-total abortion bans have endangered women who need abortions for medical reasons, such as Kate Cox, a Texas woman who was forced to travel out of state to obtain an abortion of a nonviable pregnancy that could have impacted her future fertility. Bash asked Vance if he was comfortable with laws such as the ban in Texas. 

“Well, but what President Trump has said is that we are going to let voters make these decisions. And, again, Texas might have a view that President Trump disagrees with. They might have a view that President Trump agrees with, but you’ve got to let the voters make these decisions,” Vance said.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, want mifepristone to remain legal and have vowed to pass a federal law reinstating abortion rights nationwide.

“And just yesterday in a press conference, we got a fresh reminder of what Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda would do. It would ban medication abortion in every state,” Harris said at an Aug. 9 campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona. “But we are not going to let that happen because we trust women. And when I am president of the United States and when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedoms for every woman in America, I will sign it into law.”