Newsmaker Interview: Trump vows to reduce abortions through incentivized adoptions

Former President Donald Trump says his remaking of the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe v Wade and gave pro-life activists “the upper hand” in fighting abortion, and if he returns to the White House he will focus on reducing abortions by incentivizing adoptions.

“I think it's very important that if I win, and I hope I'm going to win, we're winning by a lot right now, we'll be pressing the adoption option,” Trump said in a wide-ranging interview Monday night with Just the News, No Noise television show on the opening night of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) convention in Orlando, Fla.

The 45th president, leading handily in the 2024 GOP nomination race, called into the show from his Mar-a-Lago office and discussed the border, the Durham report, the weaponization of the government and the failures of the news media.

But he spent a good deal of time describing his thinking on abortion in the post-Roe era, in which some red states are drastically reducing access to abortion, such as in Florida where Gov, Ron DeSantis signed a bill outlawing most abortions after six weeks.

Trump said he opposes abortion, but he believes women who are victims of rape or incest should have the option to end a pregnancy now that the issue has been returned by the justices to the states. He described such exceptions as good politically and morally.

“I'm a person who feels that the exceptions are very important for a lot of reasons. But they're also important from the standpoint of an election,” he said. "...If you don't have the exceptions, it's very, very hard. I think that's been proven. It's very, very hard to win an election.

“Now, I don't say you do it for that. You do it for other reasons, moral reasons," he added. "You do it for what you really believe. But it still is a very, very difficult thing to overcome, I would say from the standpoint of an election."

While DeSantis – who gave the keynote Monday at the NRB meeting – has touted his Florida abortion policy ahead of his expected entrance into the presidential race later this week, Trump said none of it was possible without his first-term success in adding three new conservative justices to the high court before it reversed the half-century-old Roe decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

"I did something that nobody else in 52 years was able to do. I got rid of Roe v. Wade," he said. "...But what it really did is it gave pro-life people the right to negotiate and a tremendous power to negotiate. Before they had no chance of doing anything. You could kill a baby after nine months in the womb, you could kill a baby after birth."

"Before they (pro-life activists) had no power in negotiation. Now, the pro-life group actually has the upper hand, and they can negotiate something that will be very fair, and very good," he added.

Trump said he and his team have done a lot of policy thinking since Roe was overturned and said he could embrace the creation of an adoption corps that would get parents pre-approved to adopt babies from women weighing whether or not to have an abortion.

Tax breaks, he said, could create incentives for both the birth mother and prospective adoptive parents.  

"I think the incentive is great. And I think the concept of adoption is fantastic," he explained. "And it could go a long way. And it's something that I would be supportive of, very supportive of. And we'd get that done. I don't even think that would be a very difficult thing to get done."

Trump also blasted a decision by the Biden administration, first reported by Just the News, to end familial DNA testing of children crossing the border, a key tool to prevent fraudulent families from entering the United States and to thwart child trafficking by drug cartels.

Trump said the decision was part of a larger policy initiative by the Biden administration to weaken border security, predicting it would have dire consequences for America.

“I think you know, there's going to be 15 million people by the end of the year," he said. "And they don't know who they are, where they're from. They don't know where they're coming from. They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions, insane asylums. They're dumping everybody all over the world."