President Trump Was Right: Joe Biden Supports Abortions Up to Birth

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Aug 28, 2020   |   10:40AM   |   Washington, DC

Two widely-regarded fact checkers used nonsensical arguments to claim that President Donald Trump is wrong about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party supporting abortions up to birth.

Both Politifact and the Washington Post asserted that Democrat leaders do not support late-term abortions because the party has not explicitly said that it does and because late-term abortions are only about 1 percent of all abortions in the U.S. They also claimed abortions up to birth do not happen.

Their arguments do not make sense, but that is how they tried to refute Trump’s statement Thursday during the Republican National Convention.

Trump, as he often does, called out the Democrats’ pro-abortion extremism, saying, “Joe Biden claims he has empathy for the vulnerable, yet the party he leads supports the extreme late-term abortion of defenseless babies right up to the moment of birth … stopping a baby’s beating heart in the ninth month of pregnancy.”

Politifact called it a “mischaracterization,” while the Washington Post gave the claim “Three Pinocchios” out of four.

According to Politifact:

Biden has said he would codify the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade and related precedents. This would generally limit abortions to the first 20 to 24 weeks of gestation. States are allowed under court rulings to ban abortion after the point at which the fetus can sustain life, usually considered to be between 24 and 28 weeks from the mother’s last menstrual period — and 43 states do. But the rulings require states to make exceptions “to preserve the life or health of the mother.” Late-term abortions are very rare, about 1%.

The Democratic Party platform holds that “every woman should have access to quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion—regardless of where she lives, how much money she makes, or how she is insured.” It does not address late-term abortion.

The Washington Post made similar points, referring to Roe v. Wade and the 1-percent statistic, and adding: “[Republicans] argue that some laws and court decisions have opened loopholes that allow abortions to the very end of a pregnancy. Experts have told us abortions up to the moment of birth, what could be described as infanticide, are not happening in the United States.”

There are so many problems with these so-called “fact checks” that it’s hard to know where to begin.

First, to address the Washington Post’s claims, “not happening” is not the same as not supporting. A candidate or party can support something even if it is not currently happening. Second, there is evidence that late-term abortions on viable, healthy unborn babies and infanticide are happening.

Stories of babies who survived abortions indicate that late-term unborn babies are sometimes aborted and doctors agree to do it. And doctors and nurses, infamously including Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, have admitted that, if late-term babies are born alive, they are sometimes left to die without medical treatment.

What’s more, the 1-percent statistic that both fact checkers cited is not an argument against Trump’s statement at all. It actually is proof that late-term abortions are happening, and it does not take much research to discover that Democrats are the politicians blocking efforts to protect unborn babies from late-term abortions.

In the fact checkers’ minds, the 1-percent statistic supposedly proves that late-term abortions on viable babies (who could be born alive and survive, aka abortions up to birth) are rare, but 1 percent of 862,320 abortions each year is still more than 8,000 dead babies.

The statistic also refutes the fact checkers’ misleading claims about Roe v. Wade “generally limit[ing] abortions to the first 20 to 24 weeks.” The infamous abortion ruling allows abortions for basically any reason through all nine months of pregnancy. Because of Roe, states have to pass laws if they want to protect viable, late-term babies from abortion, and some have not. For example, Colorado and New Mexico allow abortions without restriction, and abortionists there openly advertise late-term abortions in the third trimester.

Back in 2017, the Washington Post’s own fact checkers confirmed that, because of Roe, the U.S. is one of only seven countries in the world to allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

“We should note that some of the seven countries allow abortions after 20 weeks, but ban it after 24 weeks. And other countries have no federal limits, but legislate at the state or provincial level, similar to the United States,” fact checker Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote at the time (emphasis added).

Biden has said he wants to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, and the new Democratic Party platform supports this, too. The platform supports abortions without limits, and recently, Biden said he also supports the so-called right to abort an unborn baby “under any circumstances.” He also wants to force taxpayers to pay for them. His vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, even voted against a bill that would have protected newborn babies from infanticide.

Trump was right, and the fact checkers were wrong. Democrat leaders, backed by campaign donations from the billion-dollar abortion industry, support aborting unborn babies without restriction.

On Thursday, LifeNews also fact checked a “fact check” by Snopes claiming it’s “mostly false” that Democrats in the U.S. Senate “voted to allow health care practitioners to let babies die, untreated, if born alive after an abortion” in 2019 and 2020.