Fact-Checking the AP Fact Check

The Associated Press, in its fact check of last Thursday’s presidential debate, had this to say:

TRUMP: “The problem they have is they’re radical because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth, after birth.”

THE FACTS: Trump inaccurately referred to abortions after birth. Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.

Abortion rights advocates say terms like this and “late-term abortions” attempt to stigmatize abortions later in pregnancy. Abortions later in pregnancy are exceedingly rare. In 2020, less than 1% of abortions in the United States were performed at or after 21 weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Abortions later in pregnancy also are usually the result of serious complications, such as fetal anomalies, that put the life of the woman or fetus at risk, medical experts say. In most cases, these are also wanted pregnancies, experts say.

Let’s start with infanticide. The Associated Press is correct that no state has legalized infanticide outright. It’s possible Trump was referring to Democratic opposition to born-alive infant protection acts, which seek to ensure that babies who survive attempted abortions receive the same standard of medical care as any other baby. But those laws only apply to abortion survivors, not newborns in general. Alternatively, you might take Trump’s comment as a reference to Kermit Gosnell. (I’m being generous. I doubt Trump even knows who that is.) While it is true that pro-choice policies against abortion facility inspections enabled Gosnell’s butchery, it’s far too soon to say whether recently enacted abortionist “shield laws” will have the same effect. I’m giving this one to the AP.

But as for abortions in the “eighth month” and “ninth month,” Trump told the truth. Pro-abortion radicals in the Democratic Party oppose gestational limits. Deflections to how “rare” third trimester abortions are do not change the truth of Trump’s statement.

Worse, the AP’s statement that such abortions “are usually the result of serious complications” is a lie. There is no citation, because they cannot provide one. There is no quantifiable data to support the idea most later abortions are medically necessary. The information we do have points in the other direction. For example, the Arizona Department of Health Services reported that over three quarters of abortions at or after 21 weeks were unrelated to maternal or fetal medical conditions. Published studies by pro-choice researchers find that women typically seek late abortions because they didn’t know they were pregnant sooner. And in interviews, late-term abortionists have confirmed that abortions on healthy mothers carrying healthy fetuses are the norm. Notably, the AP’s competitor, FactCheck.org, confirmed that the “available evidence does not support” the widespread assertion that “the majority, if not all, late-term abortions are medically necessary.”

For what it’s worth, Biden’s answer to the abortion question was to (poorly) explain Roe v. Wade‘s trimester framework — which was abandoned, not in Dobbs, but in the 1994 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

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