Quick question: Have you ever known a woman who was nine months pregnant and who just showed up unpregnant one day? Who simply shrugged and said she’d decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood after all and took care of her little problem at her neighborhood abortion clinic?
Have you ever heard of an obstetrician starting a healthy pregnant woman’s 32-week check-up by saying, “So, you still want to go through with this, right?” Or a labor-and-delivery nurse grousing about yet another rough week of dealing with infanticide clean-ups? Or, for the love of everything that’s holy, have you ever seen a hospital billboard emblazoned with a silhouette of a very pregnant woman and the headline, “Call us if you change your mind!”
Of course not. The whole idea is absurd. So why isn’t everybody jumping up and down and screaming about Donald Trump’s ludicrously horrific debate statement that Democrats “will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth”? That’s a lie. It’s a particularly cruel and ugly lie because it’s aimed at the hearts and souls of women who have gone through the most traumatic, heartbreaking experience of their lives.
When a sobbing woman who is eight months pregnant waddles into the hospital for an abortion, it’s not because she changed her mind. It’s because she and her doctor are certain that the baby is not going to make it. Abortion in the eighth or ninth month means that all the good options are off the table. It means that the half-assembled crib is going back in the box. It means that Grandma is babysitting back home, groping for a way to explain what “fetal anomaly not consistent with life” means to a 3-year-old wearing her “I’m the big sister” t-shirt.
In 2021, according to data obtained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 1 percent of abortions occurred at or after 21 weeks. When an abortion is performed in the sixth or seventh month, it means that there’s something terribly wrong with the mother, or terribly wrong with the baby, or both. When a woman needs an abortion in her eighth or ninth month, it almost always means that the fetus has problems so severe that it won’t be able to survive more than a few excruciating days or hours after birth. So, the mother has made the wrenching decision to get the whole nightmare over with.
The suggestion that women who terminate their pregnancies in the last two months—or even more horribly, that they order their doctors to kill their newborns—leaves any decent Democrat sputtering with fury. Which, of course, is why Trump and his minions keep saying it.
This whole “abortion through the ninth month” nonsense has been gaining traction for almost a decade. Frankly, I can’t understand why we Democrats haven’t pushed back hard on this.
Maybe party leaders just can’t believe that anyone could think that we would actually support infanticide. If that’s the problem, I recommend they knock on some doors in the Midwest. I learned that the hard way while doing GOTV in Ohio in 2016. I was chased across a front yard in a quiet little neighborhood in Maumee, a Toledo suburb, by a livid old white guy who kept screaming, “Hillary supports abortion in the ninth month!” He was so angry and seemed so unhinged, I was honestly afraid he might beat me up—or even pull out a gun and shoot me.
Or maybe they fear being dragged into a trick box of anti-abortion rhetoric. If we say, “Of course we oppose third-trimester abortion for any reason other than to end a non-viable pregnancy or preserve the health of the mother,” we might get drawn into ever-tightening circles: “When you say preserve the health, do you mean she has to be dying? No? Well, how sick does she have to be? What if she’s seriously mentally ill? Does that count?” and so on, and so on, until we disappear, exhausted, into a furious maelstrom of “what ifs.”
The real problem here is that Democrats understand reality: Pregnancy can be straightforward and uncomplicated, or it can be difficult and dangerous and suddenly terrifying. Democrats don’t want to set an arbitrary cutoff point for abortions because we understand that, no matter what seemingly reasonable guardrails you write into law, there will be some woman, somewhere, whose life and health are threatened because her specific case somehow fell through the cracks.
Let’s be very clear: Democrats do NOT support “abortion” of healthy babies in the eighth month, the ninth month, or at the moment of birth. We already have laws against infanticide in every state, and those laws protect every baby who is born alive. Those laws are backed up by hospital mortality review committees that delve into the circumstances and causes of deaths in those hospitals—
including the deaths of newborns. Those committees are further buttressed by the doctors, nurses, and other medical staff who are present when heavily pregnant women come in for care. If there were really murderous obstetricians out there committing infanticide, labor and delivery nurses and staff would be reporting them to hospital officials and law enforcement.
It’s hard for me to express just how insulted and infuriated I am by this “Democrats support infanticide” trope. Because I know so many women who have willingly risked their health and even their lives to give birth to their children, I’ve also, sadly, known a few who got that horrible call from the obstetrician—the one that starts, “We have your test results, and we’d like you to come in as soon as possible. Bring your husband.”—and who made the tragic decision to end a hopeless pregnancy.
Every ugly-souled Republican who parrots that nasty talking point, from Trump all the way down to that maniac in Maumee, is hurling an unforgivable insult at all of us. They’re mocking every woman who has ever lain carefully immobile in an obstetric ward, silently willing her baby to hang in just another day, another week, another month, until it might breathe on its own. They’re slinging mud at every devastated woman who ever stacked the baby shower gifts under a tarp in the garage because she just couldn’t bear to look at them. They’re belittling every bereft woman who keeps a private, lifelong sorrow calendar—the date she found out she was pregnant, the date he was supposed to be born, and the date she made the awful but medically necessary decision to let him go.
Those women are the reason Democrats stand for reproductive rights with no restrictions. Because when someone is enduring the worst day of her life, we don’t want to make it even more horrible just to score a cheap political point.
So the next time Trump or one of his supporters tries to push that ugly little notion, let’s not mince words. Just shout, “That’s a lie, and you know it.” And keep on shouting until November.
