The idea of allowing a baby to die of neglect after surviving an abortion is rightly considered abhorrent; actively killing an infant after birth is even worse. Abortion advocates often deny that these events happen at all; a new article from the fact-checking Poynter Institute for Media Studies is the latest example of this.
An article from Louis Jacobson and Samantha Putterman set out to debunk claims from President Donald Trump that some politicians support the killing of children, sometimes even those that accidentally survive abortions. In a video posted to Truth Social, Trump called the Democratic Party extreme on the issue of abortion.
“They support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month,” he said. “The concept of having an abortion in the later months, and even execution after birth. And that’s exactly what it is. The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”
Jacobson and Putterman roundly dismissed this claim. “We have rated similar statements from Trump and other Republican leaders False,” they wrote. “Democrats aren’t calling for the killing of infants after birth. Willfully ending a newborn’s life is illegal in every U.S. state.”
But is this fact check telling the whole truth? In short, no.
In their article, the authors make at least three serious errors: 1) They put the testimony of abortion providers over actual reported facts from the CDC and state reports, 2) they falsely claim that existing federal law already prevents leaving abortion survivors to die (infanticide), and 3) they claim that infanticide is illegal in every state — and therefore, it never happens.
Poynter Institute Screenshot
Pro-abortion bias
Numerous pro-abortion advocates were cited as sources to disprove Trump’s claim.
“Using the word ‘execute’ heightens the rhetoric here, but even if he said ‘killing’ it doesn’t matter,” Lois Shepherd, a University of Virginia law and biomedical ethics professor, said. “Abortion providers do not do this, doctors do not do this, no politicians that I know of support this — it’s a made up issue.”
Not mentioned is that Shepherd is co-director of Studies in Reproductive Ethics and Justice at the University of Virginia, that she has written books in support of abortion, and that she has called for a federal law mandating abortion’s legality.
Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at University of California, Davis, also was quoted as saying that Trump’s use of the word execution “goes back to a much earlier era, right after Roe, when abortion methods were more primitive. Occasionally there were live births and doctors would be prosecuted.” Ziegler, too, has called for restrictions on abortion to be eliminated.
“The language of ‘execution’ is ignorant, deceptive, inappropriate and is being used only to provoke outrage when in fact it is mercy and compassion that drives post-abortion care of horribly malformed children,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Medical Center. Caplan has called for Catholic hospitals to be defunded, while urging Planned Parenthood to receive taxpayer dollars. He has also stated that he believes children with disabilities should not be considered for organ transplantation.
Existing law is not enough
The article goes on to argue that existing child abuse laws, along with the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, is enough to protect abortion survivors from being actively killed or left to die. Yet this is, unfortunately, false.
Other legislation aiming to specifically protect abortion survivors has failed in the past, with pro-abortion legislators and activists specifically claiming that the 2002 legislation was already enough. Yet the 2002 bill includes virtually no penalties for anyone who breaks the law.
It does not mandate the kind of treatment abortion survivors should receive, or even if they must be transported to the nearest hospital. The legislation essentially only protects abortion survivors in theory by proclaiming them to be “persons,” separate from their mothers.
If an abortionist still chooses to leave an abortion survivor to die (or actively kills him or her), there are no “teeth,” so to speak, to the 2002 law.
Abortion survivors exist
The article outright stated that babies surviving abortions is a myth.
“People have been looking for evidence for decades of being born alive after abortions and there aren’t any to my knowledge, and that’s not particularly surprising,” Ziegler erroneously claimed. “The procedures most doctors would use later in pregnancy today would make it impossible to result in a live birth.”
Yet this, too, is false.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that over the course of 12 years, over 100 infants survived for at least a short time after abortions. A recent abortion report from Minnesota also revealed that five children were born alive during abortions in that state… in 2021 alone! Furthermore, the report stated that none of them received medical care — in other words, they were left to die.
Still another report found that over 100 babies were born alive following abortions in just five states over approximately a decade. And though Kermit Gosnell is the most notorious example of an abortionist who either allowed abortion survivors to die or actively murdered them, he is far from alone.
READ: How legal abortion opened the door to pro-infanticide bills
Infanticide happens, too
Jacobson and Putterman likewise say it is false that anyone supports infanticide, or that it even happens. “Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric exaggerates by saying the party supports killing an unwanted infant after birth,” they wrote. “This would be infanticide and is illegal in every state.”
First, on the milder end of infanticide, there’s the issue of ‘partial-birth’ D&X abortions… which, according to undercover footage from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), may very well still be happening.
A D&X ‘partial-birth’ abortion procedure is when a preborn baby is fully delivered by the abortionist feet-first, with the baby’s head still inside the mother. The infant’s entire body is outside of the mother’s body, with only the head remaining in the vaginal canal. The abortionist then makes an incision in the baby’s neck, inserts a catheter, and suctions out the baby’s brain, which causes the skull to collapse. Only then is the baby’s head delivered from the mother.
The violent, horrific procedure is illegal federally and in multiple states across the country — yet Suzie Prabhakaran, vice president of medical affairs for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, says she uses an “intent statement” as a way to get around the laws against it. Regardless of how the abortion procedure is actually carried out, as long as abortionists say their “intent” is not to violate the law, they consider themselves covered.
“So some people train to just document that like, you know, to comply with the partial-birth abortion ban, you basically have to say, ‘I intend to utilize dismemberment techniques for this procedure,’ which is what we do always,” she said. “Like if you do this procedure with suction, that’s how you do it. So if you document that, then you can just… some people just don’t do dig [digoxin]. Because that’s how they comply with the ban.”
Worse are abortionists and staffers who do outright admit to either supporting infanticide or being willing to commit it.
Planned Parenthood lobbyist Alisa LaPolt Snow testified against a bill requiring medical care for abortion survivors before the Florida House, where she said the fate of babies who survive abortions “should be between the patient and the healthcare provider.” In other words, Planned Parenthood’s position is that a baby should be left to die, if that’s what the mother and abortionist want.
Former StemExpress technician-turned-whistleblower Holly O’Donnell, who sadly died in 2018, spoke about seeing a baby born alive after an abortion — and rather than be allowed to provide aid, she was instructed to move forward with harvesting the child’s brain:
She’s like, OK, I want to show you something! So she has one of her instruments, and she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this fetus that’s heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think. She was like, do you know why that’s happening? And I knew why that was happening, it’s because the electrical current — the nodes — were still firing. And I don’t know if that constitutes — it’s technically dead, or it’s alive?
It had a face. It wasn’t completely torn up. And its nose was very pronounced, it had eyelids, and its mouth was pronounced. And then, since the fetus was so intact, she said, “OK, well, this is a really good fetus, and it looks like we can procure a lot from it. We’re gonna procure brain.”
So, the moment I hear it, I’m like, that means we’re gonna have to cut the head open. We’re gonna have to cut the head open. So she’s like, “OK, so what you do is, you go through the face,” and I’m thinking, no, I don’t want to do this … she gave me the scissors and told me to cut down the middle of the face.
Live Action’s Inhuman investigation likewise featured undercover admissions from various late-term abortion facilities, where staffers stated they would either allow abortion survivors to die, or actively ensure they died. At Family Planning Associates Medical Group in Phoenix, Arizona, an investigator was assured that staff would do nothing to help the baby survive, instructing the woman to go to the abortion facility and not to the hospital if she delivered a live baby.
Cesare Santangelo’s late-term Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, D.C., was visited by an investigator who was 25 weeks pregnant; she was told, “we would – we would not help it. We wouldn’t intubate.” Even worse, at Emily’s Women’s Center in the Bronx, the staffer discussed actively killing a baby who survives an abortion. When asked about a baby who is born after an attempted abortion still breathing, she said they would place the baby in a jar of “solution.”
The solution will make it stop. It’s not going to be moving around in the jar … that’s the whole purpose of the solution. It’ll automatically stop. It won’t be able to… not with the solution…. It won’t be able to breathe anymore.
Recent bills in Maryland, Colorado, and California also were phrased in a way that legal experts believe could create a legal loophole to allow infanticide. Bioethicists, including the notorious Peter Singer, have unabashedly argued in favor of infanticide. Even the Presbyterian Church USA refused to issue a vote denouncing infanticide.
It’s not pleasant to confront the notion that some people do, in fact, support infanticide, and that abortion survivors do exist… and frequently are left to die. But that doesn’t make it false.
Denying this reality based on the words of a few abortion activists is either propaganda disguised as a fact-check, or insane levels of ignorance from people who call themselves journalists.
