Trump surrogate: Roe v. Wade won’t be overturned
.@RepChrisCollins: Roe v Wade won't be overturned, asking about abortion is gotcha question https://t.co/1SzgTeWlcz https://t.co/H62ZnkScIn
— Alisyn Camerota (@AlisynCamerota) April 1, 2016
Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), a backer of Donald Trump for president, defended the Republican front-runner’s comments on abortion while stating Friday that overturning Roe v. Wade is “not gonna happen.”
“It’s the settled law of the land. Roe v. Wade is not gonna be overturned, we all know that,” Collins said during an interview on CNN’s “New Day,” adding that asking about abortion is a “gotcha question.”
{mosads}Trump sparked a political firestorm this week when he suggested during a town hall interview on Wednesday that if abortion were illegal, women who seek to get one should be punished.
He quickly backtracked, issuing a statement saying that if Congress passed legislation making abortion illegal and courts upheld it, the abortion provider, “not the woman,” would be punished.
But his remark, while seized on by his Democratic opponents, also enflamed conservative critics who view the billionaire businessman as out of line with their thinking on key social issues like abortion.
Anti-abortion advocates have long pushed for an overturning of Roe v. Wade, and have argued that if it were to happen, abortion providers should be punished, not women who seek the procedure.
Trump maintained during a Fox News interview broadcast Thursday night that “it could be that I misspoke” on the abortion question, while Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has called his walk-back “unconvincing.”
“A kind of hypothetical, gotcha question is frankly not appropriate,” said Collins, Trump’s first congressional endorser in February who was announced Thursday as the co-chairman of the celebrity mogul’s outreach effort to House Republicans.
“I would have simply answered it by saying, ‘It’s not gonna happen, what’s your next question,'” Collins added.
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