On Wednesday night, the third and final presidential debate occurred in which Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton discussed abortion, particularly late-term and partial-birth abortion. Clinton acknowledged that she voted against a partial-birth abortion ban, stating that “Roe v. Wade very clearly sets out that there can be regulations on abortion so long as the life and the health of the mother are taken into account. And when I voted as a senator, I did not think that that was the case.”
Trump expressed his thoughts on the matter:
Well, I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.
Now, you can say that that’s OK and Hillary can say that that’s OK. But it’s not OK with me, because based on what she’s saying, and based on where she’s going, and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.
Vox’s Sarah Kliff ran with Trump’s comments, using the tweet of someone trained in late-term abortions as her ‘fact-checker’ to claim that no abortions occur in the 9th month of pregnancy. (Her fact checker is a self-proclaimed “sexpert” who, in a blog for the Huffington Post, even takes issue with Trump’s use of the word “rip” in the debate, as if he meant it as a medical term.)
As for Trump’s statements, Kliff acknowledged that Trump’s characterization “is pretty horrific imagery,” but then claimed “it’s not the reality of abortion in America,” since most abortions occur in the first trimester. Kliff conveniently leaves out the fact that even those in the abortion industry have admitted that up to 5,000 babies annually have died thanks to partial-birth abortion.
This isn’t the first time Kliff has been in denial about late-term abortions. Kliff is known for making excuses as to why she refused to cover the story of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who aborted full-term babies and then killed the ones who survived by “snipping” their necks with scissors. Newsbusters’ Matt Vespa noted Kliff’s abortion blinders in 2014 when he stated, “In [a] Newsweek piece, Kliff insisted that ‘past viability, no doctor will terminate a pregnancy without a compelling reason'” — which is, of course, completely false.
Kliff did acknowledge that doctors will perform a C-section to induce birth to save the life of a mother. Such an induction may indirectly cause the death of the child, but it is not considered an abortion, since the child’s death was not intentional. However, some women decide late in pregnancy that a living child is not their goal… so late-term abortions do still occur, despite the federal partial-birth abortion ban which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 (Gonzales v. Carhart).
But Kliff failed to prove that this somehow means abortions in the ninth month don’t exist. Doe v. Bolton, the companion case to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision, made abortion legal for all nine months of pregnancy. “In Doe, the Court announced that health, for the purposes of late-term abortion law, would be synonymous with the mother’s ‘physical, emotional, psychological, familial … wellbeing’—in other words, every reason a pregnant woman could give for seeking an abortion in the first place,” explains “Life Matters: Roe Plus 40.”
The United States is one of just four nations which allows for abortions up until birth for any reason. Under these exceptions thrust upon the nation after Doe, a woman could obtain an abortion in her ninth month of pregnancy. As Live Action News’ Kristi Burton Brown previously explained, there are seven states which have no gestational limits on abortion. What, then, is to stop a woman from obtaining an abortion late in her third trimester, no matter what Vox and its “fact-checker” say?
Abortionists have testified to performing late-term abortions on babies seven, eight, and nine months gestation, and most of those were healthy babies. Therefore, abortion advocates who claim these types of abortions are rarely performed and are only done for reasons of fetal anomaly are, at best, woefully misinformed.
The bottom line here is that Kliff and her resident “sexpert” have no basis whatsoever for claiming that abortions aren’t happening in the ninth month, when abortionists admit to committing them, and our country’s laws allow them to do so.
