Trump's Lies About Abortion in America Were Particularly Appalling

Trump’s Lies About Abortion in America Were Particularly Appalling
PUBLISHED 6/28/2024 by Julianne McShane
He falsely claimed that “all legal scholars” wanted Roe overturned, and that Democrats intend to execute newborns.



Donald Trump at the first presidential debate at CNN Studios in Atlanta on June 27, 2024. (Kyle Mazza / Anadolu via Getty Images)
(Backpfeifengesicht!!!)

This analysis was originally published by Mother Jones.

Former President Donald Trump did manage to say one accurate thing about abortion at Thursday night’s CNN presidential debate: He’s responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. “I put three great Supreme Court justices on the Court,” Trump said, “and they happened to vote in favor of killing Roe v. Wade and moving it back to the states.” This isn’t the first time Trump has boasted about yanking the constitutional right to abortion from Americans. As I’ve written, he previously has bragged about appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe. But otherwise, Trump lied constantly about the realities of abortion in the U.S. during Thursday’s debate. For example, Trump insisted that “all legal scholars” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned.

As reproductive rights scholar and NYU Law Professor Melissa Murray said when Mother Jones asked her for comment: “Yeah, that’s a lie.”
In fact, several legal scholars have noted the overturning of Roe undermines the legitimacy of the court given the blatant disregard for precedent, or stare decisis, that the conservative justices showed in issuing the Dobbs decision. Legal scholars also filed several amicus briefs in the Dobbs case urging the Court not to overturn Roe.

Trump also falsely claimed that the Supreme Court “just approved the abortion pill,” referring to the recent case FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, brought by anti-abortion extremists, which sought to roll back some rule changes by the FDA that made mifepristone, the first of two pills used in a medication abortion, easier to access. In fact, as my colleague Nina Martin wrote, the Court did not “approve” the pill, but instead ruled that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case, since it was based on several hypotheticals:

The Alliance [Defending Freedom, a right-wing religious law firm] contended that a patient might be one of the rare people for whom the abortion pill didn’t work as intended, that she might then seek emergency care at a hospital, where she might encounter a provider who might belong to one of the anti-abortion groups in the lawsuit, who might be put in the position of having to perform an emergency procedure to remove the fetus.



. . . . .



Perhaps most egregiously—and preposterously—Trump insisted that Democrats “will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth, after birth.” Let’s break that down. First, federal data shows more than 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester. Research has shown that abortions in the third trimester are extremely rare—constituting only one percent of abortions—and they typically only occur when there are major medical concerns regarding the health of the mother or the fetus, or as KFF states, “barriers to care that cause delays in obtaining an abortion.” And regarding his claim that Democrats or physicians kill newborns, that procedure is already outlawed at the federal level. So Trump spewed a lot of lies about abortion tonight. But, as I’ve written, the facts about what he’s responsible for, thanks to the overturning of Roe—young victims of rape or incest being forced to give birth or travel across state lines to access abortion, and women facing life-threatening pregnancy complications due to inability to access abortion, just to name a few—are simple facts, far away from political posturing.


https://msmagazine.com/2024/06/28/trump-debate-abortion-lies/