Hillary Clinton laid out a forceful case for why a Donald Trump presidency would set progress back decades for women in a speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund on Friday.
“Instead of working to continue the progress we’ve made, Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are working to reverse it,” Clinton said. “When Donald Trump says, ‘Let’s make America great again,’ that is code for ‘Let’s take America backwards.’”
Clinton said Trump wants to take the country “back to the days when abortion was illegal,” opposes paid family leave, and wants to defund Planned Parenthood.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee specifically took Trump to task for saying women who undergo abortions should face punishment if the procedure was outlawed. Trump’s campaign issued a statement clarifying that the punishment should be reserved for the doctors who perform abortions if they are outlawed, but Clinton and her allies have hammered the real estate mogul for wanting retribution against women who terminate pregnancies.
“Anyone who would so casually agree to the idea of punishing women like it was nothing to him, the most obvious thing in the world, that’s someone who doesn’t hold women in high regard,” Clinton said.
The speech was her first policy address since securing the Democratic nomination and indicated she would continue pressing forward on the progressive women’s rights issues she championed in the primary.
And the former secretary of state argued that it is not just women Trump would set the clock back for. She pointed to his controversial comments about Trump University Judge Gonzalo Curiel and said he “mocked” a disabled reporter.
“This election isn’t about the same old fights between Democrats and Republicans, they’ll be there, don’t worry,” Clinton said. “But this election is profoundly different. It is about who we are as a nation.”
