Even in a presidential debate packed with shocking charges, the bombshell phrase stood out.
“Execute the baby.”
Donald J. Trump used that violent and false rhetoric on Tuesday night to attack Vice President Kamala Harris for her support of abortion rights, a tactic that he has employed for years to claim the moral high ground on a divisive issue. In his final 2016 presidential debate, he accused Hillary Clinton of wanting to “rip the baby out of the womb.” Earlier this year, he said President Joe Biden would legalize abortion rights to “kill the baby.”
There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born. But Mr. Trump’s rhetoric has served as a politically powerful tool to galvanize his socially conservative Christian supporters who saw it as a moral call to arms.
That was then. The fall of Roe v. Wade plunged the country into a visceral national conversation about abortion, miscarriage and birth. Women told their stories of facing life-threatening complications, and the emotional pain of losing wanted pregnancies. Health care providers discussed heartbreaking cases of girls being raped and impregnated.
During the debate, Ms. Harris used those personal stories to try to refute Mr. Trump’s old line on new grounds: His claim was not only false but immoral.
“A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next,” Ms. Harris responded. “That is immoral. And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”
Ms. Harris’s debate performance stood in striking contrast to President Biden’s less than three months ago, when he struggled to offer a coherent answer on the Democrats’ most powerful mobilizing issue.
And her words also left Mr. Trump unsteady on Tuesday night. “His spiral began when he started talking about reproductive choice,” Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois said. “She put him on his back foot on that. And he just continued to spiral out of control and became more and more incoherent as the night went on.”
The scene played out early in the debate. Mr. Trump opened the door, loosely paraphrasing a Democratic governor:
“He said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.”
Mr. Trump attributed the quote to a former governor of West Virginia, when he most likely meant to reference the former Virginia governor, Ralph Northam.
In early 2019, Mr. Northam stumbled into a political firestorm when Democrats in his state’s legislature were pushing a bill that would lift some restrictions on abortions after 28 weeks.
Such abortions later in pregnancy are extremely rare — less than 1 percent happen after 21 weeks, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization — and generally occur because the fetus has a fatal condition or the pregnant woman’s life or health is at severe risk.
A drug can be injected to stop the fetal heartbeat before birth, or a suction device ends the life before it is removed from the womb. In the rare cases of premature birth, with little to no chance of the child’s survival, parents and doctors can discuss palliative care, allowing for a natural death without harsh and futile attempts at resuscitation.
In a radio interview describing the impact of third-trimester cases, when a woman would go into labor with a nonviable fetus, Mr. Northam said, “the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.”
“Then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” he continued.
Mr. Northam later said he was describing a woman faced with an impossible choice, but anti-abortion activists portrayed his comments as condoning the murder of an infant — what they called a “post-birth abortion.”
In a private White House meeting, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, pushed Mr. Trump to discuss the controversy in his State of the Union address. He eagerly complied.
“The mother meets with the doctor,” Mr. Trump said then. “They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully, and the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
Republicans across the country echoed the attack, leaving Democrats struggling to combat a wave of false assertions.
The idea behind the attacks had deep roots in the anti-abortion movement, going back to a 1971 handbook, which taught that human life begins at conception, that a fetus is deserving of rights and that, therefore, abortion and infanticide were equivalent.
Mr. Trump’s return to such aggressive language seems intended for conservative Christian voters, to prove that he has not abandoned their values, after months of softening his language on the topic.
And it represents a win for activists who have been fighting to regain their foothold in his orbit and who have embraced the strategy in their own post-debate commentary.
“President Trump is right: Kamala Harris is the extremist in this race on abortion,” Ms. Dannenfelser said in a statement. “Harris continually refuses to name any limit on abortion she supports — even painful late-term abortions of healthy babies in the seventh, eighth and ninth month, for any reason, paid for by taxpayers.”
But in this new, post-Roe environment, Democrats doubt the potency of Mr. Trump’s old language.
“I’ve always been taken aback that he’s using the most devastating moments of a woman’s life — complex scary health issues, a baby with life-threatening conditions,” said Tresa Undem, a public opinion researcher who studies abortion. “No candidate has called him on that yet, and she started to.”
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