Reacting to Donald Trump’s since-reversed assertion that women who have abortions should be punished if the procedure is outlawed, Pat Robertson seemed hesitant to rebuke the billionaire mogul. If abortion is murder, the televangelist said today, then it only makes sense to reach Trump’s conclusion.

“You know, it’s interesting, what Trump says, it shocks people, but at the same time the old adage was that abortion is illegal, that is was murder, and consequently if it’s illegal and it’s murder then there had to be some penalty attached to it,” he said.

Robertson added that many anti-choice activists now say that the law “should punish the provider who does the abortion, not the woman who is having it, which sounds more reasonable. In any event, if somebody says abortion is murder, then what do you do to somebody who commits murder? It’s a dilemma that people have been wrestling with and I’m certainly not going to get into it. But that does seem a bit draconian, but at the same time we’ve slaughtered close to 50 million unborn babies in America since Roe v. Wade.”