Former President Donald Trump revived certainly one of his most egregious lies about abortion throughout an interview televised Sunday, repeatedly making the simply debunked declare that a number of states enable physicians to “kill the baby after birth.”
The previous president and 2024 Republican front-runner made the claims throughout a pretaped sit-down interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Trump insisted on this being true eight occasions all through the interview, regardless of moderator Kristen Welker’s repeated corrections.
“You have some states that are allowed to kill the child after birth, and you can’t allow that,” Trump insisted.
“Look, the Democrats are able to kill the baby after birth,” he doubled down.
“Even after birth, you’re allowed to terminate the baby,” he claimed.
All of those statements are categorically false. It’s not authorized in a single state to willfully finish the lifetime of a new child.
“Anti-abortion politicians who make these outrageous and false claims are pushing a political agenda at the expense of real patients and people who are harmed by abortion bans,” Kelly Baden, the vice chairman of coverage for the Guttmacher Institute, mentioned in a press release to HuffPost.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS through Getty Pictures
It’s essential, she continued, to “counter anti-abortion rhetoric that has no basis in evidence, facts or medical standards of care and serves only to place abortion providers and patients at risk.”
The American School of Obstetricians and Gynecologists can also be unequivocal in its statements that no doctor would carry out what Republicans wish to discuss with as a “post-birth abortion.”
“No such procedure exists,” ACOG says on its web site, noting that claims like this are “intended to demonize not only the procedure but also the people who provide and receive it.”
A few of Trump’s lies about abortion Sunday had been even extremely particular. He claimed that New York had “passed legislation where you’re allowed to kill the baby after birth” and {that a} former Virginia governor advocated for infanticide.
New York by no means handed any such laws, and Trump’s claims that it did look like ripped straight from a social media hoax final 12 months that circulated amongst right-wing circles.
The previous Virginia governor Trump was referring to was doubtless Ralph Northam (D), who mentioned in 2019 that if a mom delivers a nonviable fetus, the “infant would be kept comfortable,” and the mother and father would have the choice to take excessive makes an attempt at resuscitation. Republicans have long-twisted these feedback, as Trump did in Sunday’s interview, and held them up as proof of a Democrat supporting toddler euthanasia.
Trump has made related feedback on the marketing campaign path lately, prompting a number of fact-checks from media shops. Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has lately made the identical outlandish declare, too.
Amongst these outraged by Trump’s feedback was Fred Guttenberg, a gun reform activist whose daughter Jaime was killed within the mass taking pictures at at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive Faculty in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
“Beyond this being a truly dumb lie, here are facts,” Guttenberg posted on X, previously generally known as Twitter. “My baby was killed after birth because of gun violence. Republicans, by blocking gun violence prevention, apparently support killing babies after birth.”
