Killing a baby ‘after birth’ is homicide and legal nowhere. What is Trump on about?

Can doctors kill babies after they’re born?

Excuse me for a moment while I state the bleeding obvious: there is no state in the US where it is “OK” to kill a baby after it is born. That is homicide and there are one or two laws that frown on that sort of thing. Unless you’ve just suffered some sort of traumatic head injury, then there’s really no excuse for confusion when it comes to this.

Yet, here we are, in the year of our lord 2024, still arguing over this very issue. You may have missed it among all the other unhinged things Donald Trump said on Tuesday night’s debate with Kamala Harris, but the former president repeated the longstanding rightwing talking point that Democrats love executing babies.

“[Harris’s] vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine,” Trump said. “[Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”

Both these false claims were fact-checked live by ABC News moderator Linsey Davis during the debate, but that hasn’t stopped the usual suspects from doubling down and insisting Trump was right. On Wednesday, for example, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade falsely claimed Minnesota (where Walz is governor) loves itself a little infanticide.

“[At first] I thought the moderators were fair but then it soon turned to the fact-checking on abortion, when it come [sic] to ‘there’s no abortion after the ninth month’, when, in fact, under Governor Tim Walz, it happened at least five times in Minnesota,” Kilmeade said. “When a moderator … fact-checks you and the moderator is wrong, that’s tough on a candidate.”

Kilmeade, I’d just like to remind everyone, is likely paid seven figures for saying this sort of unsubstantiated and unintelligible nonsense on national TV. While it’s not entirely clear what he’s going on about, I presume what Kilmeade is referring to is an amendment to a Minnesota law that Walz signed in May 2023. You can see the amendment here. The law originally stated that medical personnel must “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant”. The amendment reworded this to say “care for the infant who is born alive”. No change was made to the earlier part of the sentence which says that: “All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice” must be taken.

That amendment has been under the spotlight ever since Walz was chosen as Harris’s running mate. The right has interpreted the change of wording from “preserve the life” to “care for” to argue that it’s now OK for doctors to let healthy babies die. Sadly, it’s not just the likes of Fox News pushing this dangerous and false idea. In August, the Washington Post published a piece by Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Kathleen Parker that said much the same thing. In a piece arguing that Walz is a dangerous liar, Parker states: “The Walz-approved law says only that doctors ‘care for the infant who is born alive.’ So ‘care’ can mean ‘let die,’ if one’s conscience permits.”

Technically that sentence is correct, but it’s missing some rather crucial context. If a baby is born with a condition that means it’s not going to survive more than a few hours, for example, the former wording would have forced doctors to keep that baby alive as long as possible, even if it was suffering. The amendment allows healthcare professionals and the baby’s parents to decide if they’d prefer to offer palliative care and ensure the baby is as comfortable as possible in its last moments.

In other words: the amendment is not cruel, it’s compassionate. Critics are “not wrapping their head around what some of these situations are like”, Sara Pentlicky, a gynecologist and abortion provider, explains. “No one’s sitting there saying: ‘We should let this baby die.’ Everyone is making really hard decisions.” The former wording of the Minnesota law might have forced medical professionals to take extensive measures that would have prolonged the baby’s life in a way that wasn’t meaningful in order to ensure nobody got in legal trouble. The amendment, meanwhile, “is intended to give people the space to actually care for the baby, which in some cases might be something like hospice or palliative care”.

Those five instances of babies dying after birth in Minnesota that Kilmeade references are cases in point. Kilmeade seems to have been referencing a 2022 Minnesota department of health report that states that in 2021 “5 abortion procedures resulting in a born-alive infant were reported”. Go take a look at page 30 of that for yourself. Nobody was letting a healthy baby starve to death because the mother suddenly decided she didn’t want to be a parent. The babies weren’t going to survive and so they were kept as comfortable as possible in the meantime. Once again, when you drill down into it, what the right really has a problem with is compassion.

Elon Musk offers to give Taylor Swift a baby

After Swift finally endorsed Harris on Tuesday, Trump’s BFF Elon responded by tweeting: “Fine Taylor, you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” It’s wild that the richest man in the world is just routinely creepy towards women and it doesn’t seem to hurt his businesses at all. As Jezebel reports: “Swift is actually just the latest woman Musk has nonconsensually solicited to make babies with him. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported on the disturbing case of at least one of Musk’s employees recounting how, in 2013, he repeatedly asked her to have children with him.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Musk’s disgusting behaviour regarding women.

Laura Loomer tweets that ‘the White House will smell like curry’ if Harris wins

The far-right activist is not just some random extremist; she’s been travelling with Trump a lot recently, including to the debate on Tuesday. It’s not clear just how much she’s advising him but she’s certainly in his inner circle. Meanwhile, she’s so incredibly racist that even far-right Marjorie Taylor Greene has told Loomer to tone it down. On Thursday, Greene, who has a long history of unhinged and bigoted comments, said Loomer’s “rhetoric and hateful tone” are concerning and “doesn’t represent Maga as a whole”. I rather think it does.

Why Afghan women have risked their lives to attend a summit in Albania

The Guardian notes that the summit comes as the world’s diplomatic relations with the Taliban begin to be normalized, “with women’s voices largely absent from the conversation”.

Gallup analysis finds young women in the US are more liberal than they’ve been in decades

That’s according to an analysis of 20 years of polling data.

Florida lawmaker celebrates killing of Turkish American human rights activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi

“#FireAway,” tweeted Randy Fine. One imagines he will face zero consequences for this tweet. It’s certainly not the only outrageous comment made by a US lawmaker about the death of the 26-year-old, who was shot in the head by Israeli forces while protesting settlements in the West Bank. Joe Biden told reporters that the killing was just a sad accident due to “unnecessary escalation” and the result of a bullet ricochet. There is zero evidence that this is the case; that’s just the IDF story, which Biden chose to parrot. Eyewitness reports and a Washington Post investigation, meanwhile, refute this account.

Sarah Friedland uses her platform to condemn ‘genocide’

The Jewish American director used her acceptance speech at the Venice film festival for her debut film, Familiar Touch, to voice support for Palestinians facing “the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza”. It feels like the horrors happening in Gaza have been disturbingly normalized now – so it is even more important that people continue to speak up.

The week in pawtriarchy

Regular readers will know that this section normally hosts a lighthearted story about dogs or cats. Unfortunately, all the pet-related stories this week focused on racist rumours about immigrants eating them. So, instead, please enjoy this story about researchers winning an Ig Nobel prize (always my most-anticipated award) for discovering mammals can breathe through their anuses. Rumour also has it that Trump talks through his.