The origins of Trump’s false claim that Democrats want to allow ‘execution’ of babies after birth

(CNN) — At Tuesday night’s presidential debate, when former President Donald Trump was asked about his stance on abortion access, he offered a now-familiar explanation for his support for gestational abortion limits early in pregnancy and for overturning Roe v. Wade: the idea that, otherwise, after-birth execution of newborns would be allowed.

“You can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia,” Trump said. “He said ‘the baby will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.’ ”

Linsey Davis of ABC News, one of the debate’s moderators, responded with a fact check: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

So where did Trump’s claim about executing newborn babies — one he also made in CNN’s June 27 debate against President Joe Biden — come from?

It appears to stem from comments made by former Virginia (not West Virginia) Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat and pediatric neurologist, in an interview with Washington, DC, radio station WTOP in 2019.

Northam was asked about a proposed bill that would eliminate certain requirements around access to abortion in the second and third trimesters, and specifically about comments from the bill’s sponsor acknowledging that it would allow abortions up until just before birth.

Northam noted that abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy are “done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen: The infant would be delivered; the infant would be kept comfortable; the infant would be resuscitated, if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Northam’s comments generated backlash at the time from Republican leaders, with former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel writing on X, then known as Twitter, that he was “defending born-alive abortions.”

Northam’s office at the time accused Republicans of taking his comments out of context, saying he was referring to “tragic or difficult circumstances, such as a nonviable pregnancy or in the event of severe fetal abnormalities, and the governor’s comments were limited to the actions physicians would take in the event that a woman in those circumstances went into labor.”

The bill never became law. Abortions are currently legal in Virginia until the third trimester.

Five years later, Trump appears to be citing that interview as evidence of what he calls Democrats’ “radical” position on abortion access; his campaign didn’t respond immediately to an inquiry about it from CNN this week. But clinicians and researchers in reproductive medicine told CNN that his comments are a dramatic misinterpretation of reality.

“It’s obviously untrue,” said Dr. Diane Horvath, chief medical officer of Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland, a clinic that provides abortions up to 34 weeks of pregnancy.

“This is the same kind of tired trope that keeps getting brought out, and the purpose of it is to scare people into thinking that something nefarious is happening with medical care in this country,” she said.

How common are these abortions?

Abortions later in pregnancy are rare: Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 shows that 94% of abortions were performed before 13 weeks of pregnancy, within the first trimester - with the majority of those, 80% of the total, happening before nine weeks.

Less than 1% — 0.9% — were reported as being provided after 21 weeks, the CDC data says. That was about 4,070 abortions. However, as Horvath pointed out, the CDC’s data comes from voluntary reporting by states and doesn’t include California and Maryland, where later-pregnancy abortion is more accessible, so its numbers are incomplete and probably undercount abortions provided later in pregnancy.

Northam didn’t respond this week to CNN’s requests for comment about his statements, but Horvath described the circumstances that he appeared to be referring to — when a baby is born but not expected to live very long — as “hospice for babies.”

“What I believe he was talking about are incredibly tragic circumstances where the family receives a fetal diagnosis that is incompatible with sustained life,” she explained. “These families want to be able to spend time with their dying babies and have them get comfort care so they can pass away peacefully. … We give the same palliative care to a dying baby that we give to your dying grandma.”

Dr. Katrina Kimport, a sociologist and professor in the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health or ANSIRH program at the University of California, San Francisco, has conducted interviews with people who’ve sought abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy as part of her research. She described one woman who learned that the fetus she was carrying had “a very serious fetal health diagnosis; it was very likely that the fetus was going to die in utero, but there was a chance it would be born alive and then, within a couple of hours, would die.”

The woman’s “fervent desire,” Kimport recalled, “was to continue the pregnancy and maybe have the opportunity to hold her baby, to give birth, maybe give palliative care and ease its suffering.”

She lived in a state that had what Kimport referred to as a “born alive law,” which required any babies born alive to be offered all available interventions in an attempt to save them. So, Kimport said, the woman “was told that because of the law in her state, she would not be allowed to [give birth the way she wanted], and if she insisted on that, the state would take away her baby from her.”

The woman ultimately left the state to have an abortion, Kimport said.

Reasons for abortions later in pregnancy

It’s generally nobody’s desire to have an abortion in the third trimester, Horvath told CNN.

“People who want an abortion want it as soon as they can have it,” she said.

People who seek them out typically fall into two categories, she said: those who’ve received “new information,” and those who sought abortions earlier but faced barriers to access that caused delays.

New information, she noted, could be about the health of the fetus, their own health or life circumstances that have changed, such as a partner who has become violent.

Horvath pointed out that a “leading cause of death for pregnant people is homicide.” CDC data shows that 2% of pregnancy-related deaths in 2020 were determined to be from homicide.

She also noted that it’s not as uncommon as it may seem for people to not realize they’re pregnant until the later stages of pregnancy, particularly if they’re very young.

And barriers to care can mean people who sought abortions earlier are unable to obtain them until later in pregnancy.

Kimport described another person she interviewed who initially tried to get an abortion at 11 weeks but lived in a state where Medicaid wouldn’t cover abortions, and she didn’t have enough money to get the procedure otherwise.

“By the time she was able to raise the funds she needed, she was farther along,” Kimport said, “so the procedure was more clinically complex and expensive.” There are fewer providers who perform abortions later in pregnancy, so the woman also had to travel.

“She was after 24 weeks by the time all of that came together,” Kimport said.

Those kinds of barriers, she noted, “have only gotten more strong” since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. “That’s what an abortion ban is.”

CNN’s Devan Cole contributed to this report.

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