Campaign walks back Donald Trump support for amendment to overturn 6-week abortion ban

Former President Donald Trump rejects calls for "New American Revolution."

Former President Donald Trump says he’ll vote in favor of Florida’s abortion referendum that will appear on the ballot throughout the state for the Nov. 5 election.

NBC News reporter Dasha Burns on her X feed highlighted video of Trump telling her that he would vote to support the ballot initiative. He said, according to Burns, that he thinks Florida’s ban on abortion after six weeks is too restrictive.

“I think the six-week is too short, there has to be more time,” Trump said.

“So you’ll vote in favor of the amendment?” Burns asked.

“I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” Trump replied.

Florida’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect in May. The statewide referendum, called Amendment 4, would alter the state’s constitution to protect abortion until viability, in effect negating the six-week limitation on abortions that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed.

But shortly after Trump gave that answer during the Burns interview, his campaign released a prepared statement to Semafor attempting to walk it back.

“He has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida, he simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s National Press Secretary.

Trump, the Republican nominee for President, has previously said he thought the abortion issue should be decided by states and supported the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 vote in 2022 to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in America.

Trump had been noncommittal on abortion bans earlier this month.

“Uh, I’m going to announce that. I’m going to actually have a press conference on that at some point in the near future, so I don’t want to tell you now,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8. “I think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches. I don’t think it’s a big factor anymore really.”

In the NBC interview Thursday, Trump went further beyond just the abortion issue to say he’d support access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and announced he supports government funding of the procedure for couples trying to conceive and he acknowledged insurance companies should cover the cost.

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump said in the NBC interview. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

The Republican nominee has been a critic of far-right attempts to limit access to IVF since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled earlier this year the embryos considered for IVF procedures have actual personhood status and have protections as such under the law.