Donald Trump tells Chris Matthews: Women deserve 'some form of punishment' for abortion

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Wednesday that women who had abortions should face "some form of punishment" if Republicans were successful in banning the practice.

During a town hall event that set to air on MSNBC Wednesday night, host Chris Matthews insisted that Trump could not dodge the question of how to enforce an abortion ban.

"Look, people in certain parts of the Republican Party, conservative Republicans, would say, ‘Yes, it should,’” Trump replied, according to a transcript obtained by Bloomberg. “I would say it’s a very serious problem and it’s a problem we have to decide on. Are you going to send them to jail?”

“There has to be some form of punishment,” he said.

“For the woman?” Matthews pressed.

"Yeah," Trump replied, adding that the punishment would "have to be determined.”

“They’ve set the law and frankly the judges, you’re going to have a very big election coming up for that reason because you have judges where it’s a real tipping point and with the loss of Scalia, who was a very strong conservative, this presidential election is going to be very important,” the candidate opined. "When you say what’s the law, nobody knows what the law is going to be. It depends on who gets elected."