Where Trump’s “execute the babies” lie comes from

This week during a presidential debate, former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that Democrats want to “execute” babies, suggesting that the Democratic party supports abortions “after birth.”

The lie came up during the first confrontation between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris when asked about abortion. As ABC News anchor Linsey Davis mentioned during her real-time fact check, there is no state where it is legal to kill a baby after birth. A report from KFF notes that abortions “after birth” are illegal in every state. Trump’s false statements are in line with his previous comments about “late-term abortions,” which isn’t a technical medical term, that he also brought up in the debate with President Joe Biden.

As Salon has recently reported, abortion bans are pushing people to terminate later in pregnancy. It’s estimated that less than 1% of abortions in the U.S. occur after 21 weeks of gestation. The reasons pregnant people might seek abortion care after 21 weeks is generally due to severe medical complications — such as the fetus having a fatal anomaly. In fact, when Trump is suggesting that Democrats want to “execute” babies after birth, he is referring to perinatal palliative care. 

Trump has touted the false claim since 2019, when he mentioned it in his State of the Union address. It stems from remarks made by Democrat Ralph Northam during an interview with a local radio station when asked about Bill HB 2491, a bill that would have loosened some restrictions on abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy. 

When giving a hypothetical example of this situation, such as a fetus was nonviable, Northam said: “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.” As explained by a Reuters fact-check, Republican commentators took this out of context as an endorsement for infanticide. Since then, Trump has extrapolated that Democrats support so-called “after-birth abortion.” 

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), perinatal palliative care is a strategy that includes “options for obstetric and newborn care” that focus on “maximizing quality of life and comfort for newborns with a variety of conditions considered to be life-limiting in early infancy.”

The priority in perinatal palliative care in a situation where a newborn is born with a life-limiting condition is to both ease patient suffering and honor values. What this looks like will vary depending on the life-limiting condition. Dr. Stacy Seyb, an Idaho-based maternal-fetal medicine specialist, told Salon in July that for some lethal anomalies, like holoprosencephaly, it could be keeping the patient warm, allowing them to be with their parents, and keeping them comfortable. 

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The idea that infants are being born in the third trimester of pregnancy and being aborted after birth is a “scare tactic” and “an insult to the medical profession,” Seyb said.

But as ACOG states: “At no point in the course of delivering a newborn with life-limiting conditions and subsequently providing palliative care does the obstetrician–gynecologist end the life of the newborn receiving palliative care.”

David Hackney, a Cleveland-based maternal-fetal medicine specialist, told Salon, “perinatal comfort care” often gets conflated with “abortion,” and “euthanasia.” But as ACOG emphasizes, “abortion cannot be performed after a pregnancy has ended.”

“Conflating abortion care with the murder of an infant serves only to stigmatize lifesaving health care, defame doctors who provide critical treatment, attack people who are already suffering the loss of a wanted pregnancy or facing serious illness, and further a politicized agenda that aims to restrict access to health care and erode people’s rights to bodily autonomy,” ACOG states. “Such allegations endanger the lives of people seeking health care and the physicians who provide that care.”

Hackney told Salon patients who are pursuing pediatric palliative care do so in “complicated and gut-wrenching circumstances.” To take those scenarios and “cartoonishly amplify” them as “murdering babies” is harmful and offensive. For people who have to go through complicated pregnancies with fatal fetal anomalies, and give birth to infants who don’t survive outside the uterus, the experience, Hackney said, stays with people for a long time. To see candidates talking about it in such a way on television, he said, would be “painful.” He added that palliative care for other situations hasn’t become weaponized for political gain.

“If you take a lot of the same fundamental decision making and you apply it to an old man with cancer who uses comfort care, you wouldn’t have politics and fabricated stories and presidential candidates talking about things,” Hackney said. 

Spreading misinformation about perinatal palliative care, ACOG says, “serves only to endanger those who need it and who provide it.”