Donald Trump’s comments have been ridiculed by scholars, condemned by the medical community and even questioned by anti-abortion advocates.Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press
Of all the grisly possibilities invoked by politicians in this U.S. election season, few compare with the image of a newly born infant killed by the medical professionals who, just moments before, delivered the baby from its mother’s womb.
“Minnesota and other states have it where you can actually execute the baby after birth,” Donald Trump said last week. He has made versions of this comment many times, with slight variations, to point a finger at his opponents, a Democratic Party whose support for abortion rights he calls “radical.”
The killing of a baby after birth, were it to happen, would be a crime – if not murder or manslaughter, then a violation of a U.S. federal law passed more than two decades ago that protects any infant born alive, even after a failed abortion. Another law, nearly as old, bans abortions conducted partway through birth.
Mr. Trump’s comments have been ridiculed by scholars, condemned by the medical community and even questioned by anti-abortion advocates. “I don’t find it believable and I don’t think most people find it believable,” said David Reardon, a prominent author who argues that abortion harms women’s well-being.
U.S. federal statistics show that just 1 per cent of abortions take place after 21 weeks of pregnancy.
The persistence of Mr. Trump’s claims underscores the political potency of abortion in a tightly contested presidential race – and the difficulty that the Republican Party is having in navigating a new landscape largely of its own making.
A majority of Americans have, for decades, supported some form of access to abortion. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 – a decision supported by three Trump-appointed justices – ended nearly 50 years of national abortion legalization in the U.S.
Since then, 14 states have outlawed abortions with few exceptions; another four ban it after six weeks. Voters in four others have passed constitutional amendments protecting individual rights to make reproductive decisions. Ten states have such amendments on the ballot this November.
Now, as the U.S. nears a presidential election, polls show that abortion has become the top issue for women of child-bearing age. It ranks second in importance only to the economy among voters in 10 swing states.
“This is a moment of backlash, essentially, to the Dobbs decision,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California Davis law professor who is among the country’s foremost historians on abortion.
And, she added, “It’s put Republicans in a pretty big predicament.”
It is a predicament Republicans themselves played a major role in bringing about, in ways often lost to modern memory.
In 1973, when the Roe v. Wade decision enshrined abortion rights, it was Republican voters who expressed the strongest support for those rights. “Almost all the leadership of the pro-life movement were committed, lifelong Democrat, social-justice Catholics,” said Ziad Munson, a sociologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn., and the author of Abortion Politics.
Republicans, however, saw abortion as a wedge they could use to their benefit, stripping away Catholics and conservative evangelical Christians from the Democratic fold.
“The abortion issue was the tip of the spear used to realign American party politics in the nineties and 2000s, in the same way that civil rights realigned American politics in the 1960s and early 1970s,” Prof. Munson said.
In more recent years, it became a flag issue, a signifier of values differentiating party loyalties – but one that, for most voters, was not deeply moored in specific policy expectations.
The Dobbs decision changed that, as the proliferation of different state laws lent new urgency to questions of policy. Republicans have struggled to navigate an issue where the views of the committed party faithful differ starkly from those of the broader American public.
Mr. Trump has responded with a series of contradictory statements, saying he opposes rules banning abortions after six weeks, but also saying he will not vote in favour of a Florida ballot measure that would protect abortion rights until the moment of fetal viability.
Among the most notable of those statements have been his suggestions that Democratic policy will result in the deaths of children already born.
It amounts to him “trying to find a way to say that the Democrats are the real extremists,” said Prof. Ziegler. “It’s kind of an older strategy, ironically.”
Dark warnings about “partial-birth abortions” animated Republican politics in the mid-1990s and 2000s, particularly after Martin Haskell, an Ohio doctor, began to discuss a new method of partial-birth abortion, known as “dilation and extraction,” or D&X, that involved ending a pregnancy with the fetus already in the birth canal. The U.S. Congress imposed a partial-birth abortion ban to end the practice, a law the Supreme Court subsequently upheld.
Critics say a loophole remains. That ban “applies only to interstate-commerce-related abortions,” said Helen Alvare, a George Mason University legal scholar who is a member of a Vatican council on family and life. A partial-birth abortion that takes place entirely within the bounds of a state “is increasingly a possibility in those states like Ohio where constitutional amendments protect abortion in every way, for every reason, and at any time,” she said.
But there is no evidence that such procedures take place in the United States. Women’s Med in Dayton, the Ohio abortion provider where Dr. Haskell remains the medical director, said in a statement that to its knowledge D&X has not been used in the U.S. for years. The clinic accused Mr. Trump of making false statements as a way to “to light up his crowd of devoted followers.”
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has promised to restore reproductive freedoms, as the issue galvanizes the party into action.
Republicans, meanwhile, continue to struggle with what comes next after the party’s success in overturning Roe. It has made for fraught politics – Mr. Trump’s equivocations on the issue have earned him repeated condemnation from prominent anti-abortion groups.
For the Republican presidential candidate, inveighing against the fabricated occurrence of post-birth killing of babies may simply be an attempt to find politically calm waters.
“He’s picked a space that’s pretty safe,” said Katrina Kimport, a professor at UC San Francisco and author of No Real Choice: How Culture and Politics Matter for Reproductive Autonomy. “Not only is this not happening, but there’s nobody out there that’s advocating for that.”