Donald Trump Says Women Should Be Punished for Abortions, Hillary Clinton Claps Back Immediately

Donald Trump is at it again.

Image via Wikimedia Commons
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Image via Wikimedia Commons

In this election cycle we haven't come close to a shortage of fodder for rival candidates on both sides of the political aisle to take shots at through social media. Just as quickly as Sen. Ted Cruz, billionaire Donald Trump, and Gov. John Kasich speak on any number of Republican hot button issues, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders have their Twitter fingers ready to fire back. Because Trump evidently can't decide where he stands on women's reproductive rights, the once pro-abortion presidential hopeful said in an interview today that he feels it should be a punishable offense.

In a interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, which premieres Wednesday evening, Trump was confronted with a topic for which his position has conveniently changed since he entered the race for the Republican nominee. "This is not something you can dodge," Matthews says, prefacing his question. "Should abortion be punished?"

After some convoluted back-and-forth—during which Trump actually threw the question back at Matthews—he responded by claiming that there should be "some form of punishment" for women who undergo the procedure and failed to elaborate on any kind of conditional details.

Being that this is perhaps the most decisive topic between the warring parties, Hillary Clinton (who, like Bernie Sanders, is pro-choice) took to Twitter to respond.

If you would like to watch Trump's comments in full, Mashable has attained a pre-airing clip of the exchange.

As our recent Complex Life deputy editor Ross Scarano points out in his feature on anti-choice TRAP laws, proposed abortion punishment for women is uncommon even among pro-life supporters. This makes Trump's commentary all the more inflammatory, though the specifics of that "punishment" have yet to be named.

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