Former President Donald Trump ramped up dangerous misinformation about abortion on Monday by falsely accusing Democrats of murdering babies, likely in hopes that more Republicans will rally around their presumptive presidential nominee.
The lies were part of a video the candidate posted on his Truth Social platform, revealing his long-awaited official position on abortion ahead of the 2024 election. The indicted ex-president praised himself for setting up the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and said that the issue of abortion should be left to the states.
Despite saying he supports some exceptions like rape, incest and the mother’s life, Trump still went after Democrats for supporting abortion rights at the state and national level.
“It must be remembered that the Democrats are the radical ones on this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month,” he falsely claimed in the video.
“The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth — and that’s exactly what it is, the baby is born, the baby is executed after birth — is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that,” he continued.
Anti-abortion conservatives have long labeled their opponents as “baby killers”, making way for extremist, Trump-supporting conspiracy groups like QAnon to believe and amplify dangerous lies that accuse Democrats of ritualistic killing and child abuse.
The reality is that Trump and his party are oversimplifying a complex issue, labeling it a “late-term abortion” to rile up voters, despite the political buzzword having no medical basis. Pregnancy terminations after the first trimester are already extremely rare in the US, so much so that less than 1% of abortions in 2020 were carried out at 21 weeks or later. The subset of abortions after 26 weeks — the third trimester — is even smaller, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The few cases of abortion in the third trimester, which are not at the moment of birth, as Republicans allege, also usually involve specific factors that are difficult to accommodate in advance, such as severe fetal anomalies that would leave the baby with no chance of survival, conditions that threaten the pregnant person’s life and delays in care due to legal restrictions on abortion access.
“It’s disgusting and [a] blatantly false accusation that Donald Trump is making to try to distract from his own unpopular policies,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said on a press call. “We know that the president has stated his position time and again, that he believes that Roe got it right.”
Monday’s video was not the first time Trump falsely accused Democrats of killing babies. During his 2020 campaign trail and presidency, Trump inaccurately described graphic imagery of what he believes abortion procedures look like and falsely claimed that his political opponents support killing babies.
In February 2019, the former president tweeted that Democrats’ stance on abortion “is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth”.
That tweet was in reference to a Senate bill at the time called the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. The bill was backed by anti-abortion advocates and stated that anyone — except the mother — who “intentionally performs or attempts to perform an overt act that kills a child born alive” can be prosecuted for “intentionally killing or attempting to kill a human being”.
The bill failed on a procedural motion, falling short of the 60 required votes to advance it. Democrats have said that the bill was redundant because laws already exist to prosecute those who harm a newborn.
Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said on Monday that it “shouldn’t be up to a group of mostly male legislators deciding how to criminalize your behavior”.
Trump is “fine with states criminalising women. He’s fine with states giving bounties to those who might report somebody who terminates a pregnancy. Great,” Kaine said.
“You put that out there, and we Democrats and Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, we’re going to say we believe that women’s reproductive freedom should be protected in the country, whatever zip code you live in, whatever state you live in,” he added.
HuffPost reporter Alanna Vagianos contributed to this report.