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That's not a leak — Robinson said it himself in a new ad.
Mark Robinson believes abortion should be illegal — for everyone except him and his wife, apparently.
The North Carolina Republican has come out with a new campaign advertisement in his bid for governor in which he and his wife opened up about their decision to have an abortion decades ago. The commercial comes shortly after Robinson's recent promise at a campaign rally to completely ban the care in the state.
"Thirty years ago, my wife and I made a very difficult decision. We had an abortion," Robinson says in the ad. He then voices support for the current abortion restrictions in North Carolina, which prohibit the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother.
Robinson previously admitted to paying for his wife, then-girlfriend, to have an abortion, but had not been outspoken about the decision until the commercial, which marks a stark shift in his stance on the care. Robinson told voters at a campaign event in February that he would work to completely ban abortion if elected, stating, "We’ve got it down to 12 weeks, the next goal is to get it down to six, and then just keep moving from there."
Robinson referred to abortion as "murder" and "genocide" on his Facebook page in 2018, later saying in a 2019 Facebook live stream that if he had a “willing” state Legislature, he would sign a law banning abortion “for any reason.”
“Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers, it is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down," Robinson claimed.
Robinson, the first Black lieutenant governor of North Carolina, has repeatedly made headlines for his contentious remarks about the LGBTQ+ community, as well as anti-Semitic comments including Holocaust denial and promoting reading Adolf Hitler.
Robinson has said that transgender women should be “arrested” for using women’s bathrooms. He’s also said that instead of using the women’s bathroom, trans women should “find a corner outside somewhere to go." He has described straight couples as “superior” to gay couples as well as equated LGBTQ+ people to “maggots” and “flies," and referred to homosexuality and "transgenderism" as "filth."
A campaign spokesperson for Josh Stein, the Democratic candidate for governor in North Carolina, asserted that Robinson's most recent ad does not truthfully reflect his stance on abortion.
“If North Carolinians want to know where Mark Robinson really stands on abortion, they should listen to every other comment he’s made on the issue before today,” Morgan Hopkins said in a statement Friday. “Mark Robinson knows North Carolinians can’t stomach his beliefs that abortion should be banned ‘for any reason’ and that women have abortions because they ‘can’t keep their skirts down,’ so he has resorted to running from his record and misleading voters."
