If Donald Trump wins a second term in office, will he move to ban the abortion drug mifepristone? On one hand, during his debate with Joe Biden, the ex-president said he “agreed” with the Supreme Court’s June ruling that preserved access to the pill. On the other hand, when a reporter at a Thursday press conference asked if Trump would have his Food and Drug Administration “revoke access” to mifepristone, his response was: “Sure, you could, you could do things that will be, would, would supplement. Absolutely…. But you have to be able to have a vote, and all I want to do is give everybody a vote.”

Questioned about this flip-flop while doing a series of interviews on Sunday, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, did not exactly clear things up. Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash to clarify the ex-president’s position, Vance responded, “What Donald Trump has said is that he respects the Supreme Court’s opinion on the mifepristone ruling.” Yet, as Bash noted, the Court’s ruling earlier this year was merely that the plaintiffs in the case before them did not have the legal standing to bring their challenge; the justices did not address the merits of the case, nor the question of whether the FDA had acted properly when it expanded access to the drug. Asked directly if “a Trump-Vance administration would allow mifepristone to continue to be sent around the country,” Vance said that Trump’s “goal is not to block mifepristone” but to “let states make the decision on abortion policy.” Which could, of course, result in certain states banning the drug. (And some of them already have restricted access to it.)

Speaking to CBS’s Margaret Brennan on the same day, Vance first claimed that it was loud in the room and “it wasn’t clear what the reporter was asking,” so “maybe [Trump] couldn’t hear that person super clearly.” Then he said that Trump “agrees with the Supreme Court decision, but more importantly, he wants these decisions to be made by the states.” Later, pressed again on Trump’s “you could do things” comment, Vance repeated that it was “a loud room where he couldn’t hear the question super well. But I think his view on this has been very clear.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign stuck to the same story, telling NBC News that the questions during the presser were “difficult to hear” and that Trump’s position is that he supports “the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.”

Of course, at the end of the day, people who believe in reproductive rights can’t really believe anything the ex-president says when it comes to abortion. For one thing, Trump has repeatedly bragged about and claimed responsibility for the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, and anyone who proudly boasts about killing the federal right to an abortion obviously does not care about protecting abortion access. For another, Trump regularly lies about abortion; during the press conference in which the mifepristone question came up, he told his oft-repeated lie that Democrats “are allowed to do abortion on the eighth and ninth month, and even after birth.” That's not a person who's earned the right to say take my word for it.

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