Abortion

There are political disagreements where reasonable people can look at the same facts and reach very different conclusions. Abortion is obviously one of them.

But before we argue about what the law should be, we ought to be able to agree on what is actually happening.

Back in 2019, Donald Trump made an extraordinary statement at a rally in Wisconsin. He described a situation in which a baby is born, the mother meets with the doctor, the baby is wrapped up and cared for, and then—as Trump put it—the doctor and mother decide whether to “execute the baby.”

That’s an incredibly powerful image.

It’s also important to separate that image from several very different things that tend to get mashed together in the abortion debate.

First, there’s abortion—ending a pregnancy.

Second, there’s a baby who is born alive.

And third, there’s a devastating medical situation in which an extremely premature infant or an infant with catastrophic abnormalities is born alive but may have virtually no possibility of long-term survival.

Those aren’t interchangeable situations.

Federal law has explicitly recognized an infant born alive as a person for purposes of federal law since the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002. The statute defines “born alive” using signs such as breathing, heartbeat, umbilical-cord pulsation or voluntary movement, regardless of whether the birth followed natural labor, induced labor, a C-section or an attempted abortion. 

So once we’re talking about a child who has actually been born alive, we’re no longer simply talking about terminating a pregnancy.

We’re talking about a living patient.

But here’s where this gets complicated.

There are heartbreaking circumstances in neonatal medicine where doctors and parents have to decide whether continuing aggressive treatment is actually helping a dying infant.

Imagine a profoundly premature baby or a baby born with catastrophic abnormalities.

Doctors might be able to intubate that child.

They might insert IVs.

They might administer medications.

They might mechanically ventilate the lungs.

But sometimes those interventions cannot save the child’s life. They may merely prolong dying.

In those circumstances, parents and physicians can decide to provide comfort care instead of extraordinary life-prolonging intervention.

The baby is kept warm.

The parents may hold their child.

Pain and suffering are treated.

And the child is allowed to die naturally.

Whatever your position on abortion, withholding futile treatment from a dying newborn is fundamentally different from intentionally killing that newborn.

That’s the distinction that gets lost when somebody uses a word like execute.

And there’s another important piece of context: how late in pregnancy abortions actually occur.

The CDC’s 2022 surveillance data found that 92.8% of reported abortions occurred at 13 weeks or earlier.

Another 6.1% occurred between 14 and 20 weeks.

And 1.1% occurred at 21 weeks or later. 

Now, those numbers don’t settle the moral argument.

Somebody who believes life deserves legal protection beginning at conception isn’t going to say, “Well, it’s only 1.1%, so it doesn’t matter.”

And somebody who believes decisions late in pregnancy should remain primarily between a patient and physician isn’t going to say, “It’s rare, therefore government should prohibit it.”

Those are ethical and political judgments.

But the numbers tell us something important about what we’re actually debating.

Late abortions are a small fraction of abortions reported in the CDC data.

And there’s another interesting wrinkle

Most terminations after 24 weeks were performed using medication. But the more recent CDC data paint a different national picture.

Among the reporting areas that supplied both gestational-age and method information for 2022, 80% of abortions at 21 weeks or later were classified as surgical and 19.4% as medication abortions. 

That’s not exactly the same population as “after 24 weeks,” so we shouldn’t pretend it’s a perfect comparison.

But it’s a good reminder of something else:

Fact-checkers need fact-checking too.

Information gets old.

Medical practices change.

Datasets change.

And sometimes an article can be correct about its central conclusion while containing details that later evidence complicates.

That’s why I think the larger lesson here isn’t really about Trump.

And it isn’t even entirely about abortion.

It’s about language.

If I tell you doctors are executing babies you are going to find the truth

Likewise, if somebody uses sanitized language that obscures what an abortion actually entails, that can distort the conversation in the opposite direction.

So maybe there’s a better standard:

Describe what happened as precisely as possible.

Then argue about it.

If we’re talking about abortion, call it abortion.

If we’re talking about a baby born alive, say that.

If we’re talking about withdrawing medically futile treatment from a dying newborn, say that.

And if we’re talking about intentionally killing a newborn, that’s homicide—not simply another form of abortion.

Those distinctions matter.

Because democracy gets pretty dysfunctional when we can’t even agree on the nouns.

We can disagree passionately about abortion.

We can disagree about when life deserves legal protection.

We can disagree about viability.

We can disagree about how much authority government should have over pregnancy.

Those are legitimate arguments.

But before we have them, there’s one thing we ought to demand from every politician, every political party, every news organization—and every fact-checker:

Give us the facts without manipulating us.

Then trust us to decide what we think.