On April 27, 2019, President Donald Trump held a rally in Wisconsin, where Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has vowed to veto a bill that would require medical care be provided to babies accidentally born alive during abortions. Evers claimed the bill would be “redundant and seems to be not a productive use of time.”
“The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby,” Trump said about babies who are left to die from abortions.
As charged as his words might sound, he was merely putting restating what Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said about a bill that, had it passed, would have repealed late-term abortion regulations in his state. The bill thankfully failed in committee.
“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 said on a radio program.
Predictably, the media pounced on Trump’s statements. Some even claimed that Trump was inciting violence on abortion facilities. From just these past couple of days, several media outlets have called out the president, including:
- Time’s “Trump Keeps Talking About Second-Trimester Abortions. Here’s What He Gets Wrong,” by Abby Vesoulis
- New Statesman’s “Why it’s so dangerous when Trump describes abortion as baby execution,” by Sophie McBain
- Slate’s “They Will Execute The Baby,” by Rebecca Onion
- The New York Times’ “Trump’s Anti-Abortion Incitement,” by Michelle Goldberg
- Mother Jones’ “It’s Time To Stop Repeating Donald Trump’s Lies,” by Kevin Drum
- The Daily Beast’s “‘Bizarre, Dangerous, and Insulting’: Baby Nurses Fed Up With Trump’s Bogus Abortion Rants,” by Emily Shugerman
- CNN’s “Trump’s statement on abortion, in context,” by Holmes Lybrand
- Vice News’ “Trump’s lies about doctors executing babies are outrageous and dangerous,” by Carter Sherman
- The Cut’s “Trump’s Lies About Abortion Keep Getting More Disturbing,” by Hannah Gold
Many of these articles repeat the same falsehoods. Vesoulis’ article for Time is particularly bad, since 9 percent of abortions are committed during or after the second trimester, when the baby is between 14 and 27 weeks old and can sometimes be born as a preemie. Vesoulis instead focuses on the 1.2 percent of abortions committed during the third trimester, which is the point at which most unborn babies can be saved through a C-section or induced labor. Going by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) figures, Vesoulis is really talking about 56,797 abortions, which suddenly doesn’t seem so rare.
Vesoulis also claims that late-term abortions “mostly happen because of a serious fetal anomaly or for the health of the woman.” It is an oft-repeated claim and also a misleading one. The Guttmacher Institute and a study conducted from 2008-2010 found that most late-term abortions are performed on healthy women with healthy fetuses.
Women who sought these procedures were more likely to be young, minority women with limited financial resources. Reasons given were more logistical than medical. They may have aborted because they didn’t know they were pregnant until later in their pregnancy, had trouble deciding, or had trouble making arrangements.
The claim that many late-term abortions are performed on women who face medical problems is also turned on its head when medical professionals, including former abortionists, acknowledge that abortion is never medically necessary. In cases of medical emergencies, a child may be delivered by a C-section.
But these mainstream media outlets should not even need to discuss abortion numbers because legislation that has been considered at the state and federal levels, as emphasized by the bill’s sponsor, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, does not seek to regulate or restrict abortion. It merely requires that babies born alive from abortion attempts receive the same medical care as those born at that gestation for whom parents will take responsibility. Once a child is born, no distinction is made between whether the child is wanted or unwanted.
Another claim from the media is that babies are rarely born alive from an abortion procedure. So? Proper care should still be given even if it is just one baby who is born alive. An Associated Press article writes that “Wisconsin health officials lack data on abortion survivals.” By that admittance, shouldn’t doctors err on the side of protecting babies who are born alive?
The article even acknowledges that “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 143 instances nationwide in which live births were caused by an attempted abortion between 2003 and 2014,” which means some of those live births could have resulted in babies being left to die. States aren’t even required to report their abortion numbers to the CDC, so it stands to reason that failed abortion attempts would be even more so covered-up.
It’s not merely the CDC that has evidence of babies born alive from abortion attempts. If congressional findings, personal testimonies, and stories shared by abortion survivors aren’t proof that babies are born alive, it’s worth wondering what would be.
That the mainstream media sees such a need to supposedly correct the record makes it all the more important for those of us who know better to speak up about the truth. The mainstream media is complicit in failing to protect the truly most innocent, vulnerable, and defenseless among us.
