Trump administration figures Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway are scheduled to speak at this year’s edition of the annual March for Life pro-life rally in Washington on Friday. Trump, meanwhile, has said that his Supreme Court nominees will be chosen with the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade. (Though here’s why that might not happen even if Trump gets to appoint multiple justices.)
This pro-life president, though, was famously pro-choice before deciding that he wanted to be the Republican nominee. In 2016, he refused to answer Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s question about whether he’d ever paid for or been otherwise involved in the procurement of an abortion. And above is an MSNBC clip of a 2003 Trump appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show in which he laughs about being talked into not aborting a surprise pregnancy. (It’d seem, given the timing of Trump’s children’s births, that he’s talking about Marla Maples, who’s said the conception of their daughter, Tiffany, was a surprise, and MSNBC asserts as much. But no one says Maples’ name in the clip.)
Also of note: The context of the discussion above is that Trump is talking about how pleased he is that his then-girlfriend Melania has been consistently taking birth control pills. The organization that runs the March for Life successfully sued the Obama administration to be exempted from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirements.
