Speaking to reporters at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Sunday, Robert. F. Kennedy, Jr. said he would support a ban on aborting a pregnancy after 90 days of gestation - a position his campaign soon sought to retract.
“I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life,” Kennedy said while fielding questions from a gaggle of reporters. He added: “Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.”
The media hubbub was immediate, and just hours later, Kennedy’s campaign
issued a statement claiming the 69-year-old candidate “misunderstood” the question.
“Mr. Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose. He does not support legislation banning abortion,” the campaign said.
In response, the journalist who posed the question to RFK, Jr. published on the social media site X the entire transcript of the exchange “in which I ask the questions multiple times to make sure we’re understanding - even at one point saying I was surprised by the stance.”
It’s unclear exactly what Kennedy meant, either, since fetal viability generally occurs between 23 and 24 weeks of gestation, which is more than 5 months after conception. However, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) notes “there is no single formally recognized clinical definition” of the term.
It’s also a position out of line with almost the entirety of the Democratic Party, which has long rallied around abortion rights but especially after the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson ruling last year. The decision unleashed a tsunami of bans and restrictions in Republican-controlled states.
Last week in Ohio, voters rejected a GOP-led attempt to block changes to the state constitution, such as one proposed by Democrats that would enshrine access to the medical procedure in the state’s top legal document. In California, Vermont and Michigan, Democrats have already succeeded at that effort, and similar proposals could appear on ballots in Maryland, Missouri, Nevada and New York in 2024 or 2026.
Kennedy’s campaign has been beset by scandals thanks to the candidate’s proclivity for outrageous gabs. Already controversial for his unproven views that vaccines cause autism and that chemicals in drinking water cause transgender identities, Kennedy has also drawn flak for
suggesting COVID-19 is a bioweapon deliberately engineered to spare ethnic Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews - again, a conclusion for which there is no scientific proof.
The latest
aggregate polling data compiled by FiveThirtyEight has 63.8% of Democratic voters saying they intend to vote for US President Joe Biden, while 15.2% say they intend to vote for Kennedy.