The Origins of Trump’s False Claim That Democrats Want to Allow ‘Execution’ of Babies After Birth

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

“You can look at the governor of West Virginia, the former 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 will execute the baby.’”

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

So where does Trump’s claim that he executed newborns come from – a claim he also made during the June 27 CNN debate against President Joe Biden?

This appears to stem from comments made by former Virginia (not West Virginia) Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat and pediatric neurologist, in a 2019 interview with Washington, D.C. radio station WTOP.

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

Northam stressed that third-trimester abortions are “performed in cases where there may be severe malformations, or a nonviable fetus. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen: The baby would be delivered; it would be held comfortably; it would be resuscitated, if that’s what the mother and the family want. Then there would be a discussion between the doctors and the mother.”

Northam’s comments drew a backlash from Republican leaders at the time, with former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel writing on X, then known as Twitter, that he “defends birth abortions.”

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

This bill was never passed. Abortion is currently legal in Virginia up to the third trimester.

Five years later, Trump appears to cite the interview as evidence of what he calls Democrats’ “radical” stance on abortion access; his campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNN this week. But clinicians and reproductive medicine researchers told CNN that his comments were a misinterpretation of reality.

“That’s obviously false,” said Dr. Diane Horvath, chief medical officer of Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Md., a clinic that performs abortions up to 34 weeks of pregnancy.

“It’s the same old cliché that keeps coming up, and it’s meant to scare people into thinking that something bad is happening with health care in this country,” she said.

Abortions later in pregnancy are rare: 2021 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 94% of abortions were performed before 13 weeks of pregnancy, in the first trimester — with the majority, 80% of the total, occurring before nine weeks.

According to CDC data, less than 1% (or 0.9%) of abortions were performed after 21 weeks. That’s about 4,070 abortions. However, as Horvath pointed out, the CDC data comes from voluntary reporting by states and does not include California and Maryland, where late-pregnancy abortion is more accessible. So the numbers are incomplete and likely undercount abortions performed later in pregnancy.

Northam did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on his statements this week, but Horvath described the circumstances he appeared to be referring to — when a baby is born but not expected to live very long — as “baby palliative care.”

“I think he was talking about the extremely tragic circumstances where the family is diagnosed with a fetus that is incompatible with survival,” she said. “These families want to be able to spend time with their dying baby and have comfort care so that they can die in peace. … We provide the same palliative care to a dying baby that we would to your dying grandmother.”

Katrina Kimport, a sociologist and professor in the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program at the University of California, San Francisco, has interviewed women who 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 that it would be born alive and then, within two hours, it would die.”

The woman’s “longing,” Kimport recalled, “was to continue the pregnancy and perhaps have the opportunity to hold her baby, to give birth, perhaps to provide palliative care and alleviate her suffering.”

She lived in a state with what Kimport called a “live birth law,” which required that any baby born alive be given every intervention possible to try to save it. So Kimport said the woman “was told that because of her state law, she would not be allowed to (give birth as she wanted) and that if she insisted, the state would take her baby away.”

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

Generally, no one wants to have an abortion in the third trimester, Horvath told CNN.

“People who want an abortion want it as soon as possible,” she said.

People seeking them generally fall into two categories, she said: those who received “new information” and those who sought abortions earlier but faced barriers to access that led to delays.

The new information, she noted, could relate to the health of the fetus, their own health or life circumstances that have changed, such as a partner who has become violent.

Horvath noted that “homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant women.” CDC data shows that 2% of pregnancy-related deaths in 2020 were determined to be due to homicide.

She also noted that it is not as uncommon as it seems for people not to realize they are pregnant until the later stages of pregnancy, especially if they are very young.

Barriers to accessing care may also mean that people who sought abortions earlier may not get them until later in their pregnancy.

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

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

“She was 24 weeks pregnant when everything came together,” Kimport said.

These types of barriers, she noted, “have only gotten stronger” since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. “That’s what an abortion ban is.”

CNN’s Devan Cole contributed to this report.