US presidential candidate Donald Trump has said that he and his wife Melania had discussed her decision to go public in her defence of reproductive rights.
The Republican politician spoke after the former first lady revealed her support for abortion rights this week, in the lead-up to the release of her memoir, exposing a sharp contrast with her husband on the crucial election issue.
“I said you have to write what you believe, I'm not going to tell you what to do. She's very beloved,” Mr Trump told Fox News.
“There are some people that are very, very far right on the issue and there are other people that view it a little bit differently than that.”
The former first lady appeared in a video this week and made statements on one of the defining issues of this year's presidential election that went against the views of her husband's party.
In the video, Mrs Trump declared that “individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard”.
“Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth, individual freedom. What does my body, my choice really mean?” she said.
In an excerpt from her memoir, first published by The Guardian, the former first lady writes: “It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government.”
Her husband's Republican Party has worked to cut reproductive healthcare access across the US, most notably when the conservative-majority US Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections in 2022.
Mr Trump has tried to take credit for the Supreme Court action but has since equivocated on whether he wants to see a federal abortion ban as backlash grew. His vice presidential pick JD Vance has spoken of his desire to make the procedure “illegal nationally”.
Mr Vance denied supporting a national ban on abortion on the debate stage with Democrat Tim Walz this week, but his campaign website previously endorsed that the US should “end abortion”.
In an audio clip from a 2021 interview, Mr Vance was asked about his position on abortion in instances of rape. In his response, he played down the trauma of pregnancy resulting from rape, calling it “inconvenient”.
The crackdown on US abortion rights defies a global trend of liberalisation of reproductive health care.
The US is one of only four countries that has removed legal grounds for abortion in the past 30 years, according to the Centre for Reproductive Rights. The others are El Salvador, Nicaragua and Poland.
