That is a grossly misleading oversimplification. Reagan was staunchly pro-life for over a decade before becoming President.
From "Revisionist History: Misrepresenting President Ronald Reagan’s Abortion Record", LifeNews.com:
'In the 2005 book "Essential Ronald Reagan," writer Lee Edwards points out that Reagan felt duped into signing the measure because his legal advisors told him it would leave the vast majority of abortions illegal.
'He writes that Reagan came to "deeply" regret signing the bill.
'In a period before Roe v. Wade, Reagan didn’t have the advantage of knowing that abortion advocates and courts would misuse the health exception in the bill to allow virtually all abortions to become legal. That wasn’t Reagan’s intent at all, despite Creswell’s presentation of Reagan as an abortion advocate whom pro-life voters would distrust.
'Reagan’s most able biographer, Lou Cannon, writes that Reagan have never really grappled with the issue of abortion, but that he experienced regret as soon as 1968 over signing the bill.
'Reagan said that "those were awful weeks" when he realized the fallout from the legislation and that he would never have signed the bill if he had "been a more experienced governor."'
No it's not. There was a point at which Reagan had only been pro-life for three or four years. Would he have been unfit for the Presidency then, only to become fit six years later?
That is a grossly misleading oversimplification. Reagan was staunchly pro-life for over a decade before becoming President.
Hardly "grossly." Not even misleading. Let's look at the effect of it: Reagan signing one of the nation's first abortion laws in one of the largest and most influential states in the Union, the state that is home to one of the nation's two largest media centers, opened the floodgates for abortion to be legalized throughout all the rest of the states due to the "full faith and credit" provision of the Constitution. As California and its much-criticized ultra-liberal Ninth Circuit are concerned, "as goes California, so goes the nation."
Many, many of the social ills we experience today get started in California society or California courts and soon work their way throughout the nation, such as the "Summer of Love", the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, the "60s Youth Rebellion", the "Summer of Love", the "Sexual Revolution", and in law, "palimony" and "no-fault" divorce (the latter another of Reagan's well-meant but disastrous signatures).
The fact that a real estate businessman unrelated to the political sex lobby in an ultra-liberal city in a liberal state went along with abortion laws he had nothing to do with campaigning for or legislating, and which he eventually renounced, is pale in comparison.
Secondly, while Trump only went on record against abortion five years ago (and when he is inaugurated it will be six years), there is no telling how long he privately held his antipathy to abortion before that. Certainly he identified his disapproval of partial-birth abortion 16 years ago, which if you have ever done business in a deep blue city or state, you would recognize is a fairly radical act.