In the past week alone, former President Donald Trump has twice made the oft-false claim that some US states, eager to protect abortion rights, allow babies to be killed after they are born.
“You know some states like Minnesota and other states have it where you can actually execute a baby after it’s born. And all of that is unacceptable,” Trump told a Fox News reporter on Friday when asked if he would support Florida’s Amendment 4, which would mean a constitutional right to an abortion in the state.
Trump, who was campaigning in Michigan on Thursday, made the same claim, telling his audience that “six states allow you to kill a baby after the baby is born. And one of those states is Minnesota.”
In fact, no US state, including Minnesota, allows killing a baby after birth, and numerous fact-checks have proven this. But Trump, who appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices and often takes credit for overturning it Roe v. Wadehas woven this lie into campaign speeches, interviews and debate against President Biden on the 27th. June.
The origin of the lie
The first instance of Trump claiming that some Democratic-controlled states allow infanticide appears to have occurred in his 2019 State of the Union address, three years before the Supreme Court overturned. Roe.
In the pro-abortion portion of the speech, Trump took aim at then-Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia, a Democrat who claimed he would “execute the baby after birth.”
Northam had drawn ire from Republicans for comments he made when asked about a hypothetical scenario in which a woman requests an abortion during labor after learning her fetus has severe deformities or is not viable. Addressing this scenario, Northam said “the baby would be delivered. The baby would stay comfortable. The baby would be resuscitated if the mother and the family wanted it.” However, he never mentioned that abortion could be done after birth.
Northam also supported a proposed state bill that would have left the decision on whether to perform late-term abortions to doctors and patients, but the bill failed to pass and is not law in Virginia.
During the State of the Union address, Trump also falsely said, “You have the state of New York and other places that have passed legislation that allows you to kill a baby after birth.”
Again, no state in the Union has passed such legislation.
Reframing the abortion debate
As Trump continues to spread the false notion that some states allow infanticide, more Americans say abortion is now their top issue in the 2024 election.
After the Supreme Court’s decision was overturned Roeprotecting abortion rights has become a winning cause for Democrats. A May Gallup poll found 85 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances, while a June Associated Press/NORC poll found 70 percent believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And according to an April Yahoo News/YouGov poll, a growing majority of Americans want Congress to pass legislation that restores Roe v. Wade protections, Yahoo News’ Kate Murphy reports.
Yet polls have also shown that most Americans believe that some restrictions on abortion are justified. For example, a 2023 NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 66% of respondents believed that abortion should only be allowed in the first three months of pregnancy. By contrast, only 34 percent said abortion should be allowed in the first six months or at any time during pregnancy.
This may help explain why Trump continues to talk about late-term abortions, as he did again last week.
“Democrats are radical because nine months is just a ridiculous situation,” Trump said, “where you can have an abortion in the ninth month.”
In fact, there are six states in the United States – Colorado, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont – that do not restrict when an abortion can be performed before birth.
Yet nationally, only about 1% of all abortions performed in the United States are classified as late-term (performed after 21 weeks of pregnancy), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
