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In her latest video, Mother Jones video creator Kat Abughazaleh traces the history of former President Donald Trump’s dangerous lie that some states allow parents to “execute” babies in so-called “post-birth abortions.”
“You can look at the governor of West Virginia,” Trump said during last week’s debate, prompting an incredulous head shake from Vice President Kamala Harris. “He said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute it.”
Northam, of course, did not say that. Trump wasn’t even correct about his own right-wing smear. His reference was to a wildly out-of-context quote from former Virginia governor Ralph Northam (not West Virginia). Northam’s 2019 radio appearance, in which he explained the tragic medical emergencies that can result in late-term abortions, has since been selectively edited by Republicans and used to claim their opponents are permitting infanticide—a lie that has been repeated with relish across Fox News, again and again.
As Kat explains, “There’s no such thing as a ‘post-birth’ abortion. These procedures are extremely rare and reserved for cases where the mother’s life is in danger or when a fatally ill or deformed baby needs palliative care.” In this video, Kat shows how this wasn’t Trump’s first time exploiting these tragedies, which are “designed to demonize grieving mothers and doctors,” while clarifying the facts about late-term abortion care that are too often lost to political noise. She notes that less than one percent of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy.
“By limiting abortion access in the first place, whether it’s totally or at the six-week mark, or by making parents jump through hoops just to get the medical care they need,” Kat explains, “Republicans are ensuring that there will be more cases that require traumatic medical intervention than if people were allowed to have control over their bodies in the first place.”
