During an interview with televangelist Pat Robertson that aired on the Monday morning edition of The 700 Club, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed that his opponent Hillary Clinton favors killing unborn children just days before delivery.
“According to the rules of Hillary you can take the baby at nine months, and you can imagine what you have to do to that baby to get it out,” Trump said. “A day prior to birth you can take the baby, and I said it’s unacceptable.”
Trump relied on these same sensational anti-abortion talking points during the final presidential debate — when he went on a graphic, factually inaccurate rant about babies being “ripped” from their mothers’ bodies, and characterized Clinton’s position as “you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb, in the ninth month, on the final day.”
With regard to his comments during the debate, Trump told Robertson that he’s “been called by a lot of pastors, I’ve been called by priests thanking me because they said they’ve never heard anyone explain it quite the way I explained it.”
Robertson introduced the topic by saying Clinton “took the radical feminist view in relation to abortion” during the debate, when she offered a staunch defense of a woman’s right to choose. On the topic of late-term abortions, she said, “I have met with women who have, toward the end of their pregnancy, get worst news one can get… I do not think the United States government should be stepping in and making those most personal of decisions.”
Robertson characterized late-term abortions in graphic terms, claiming this involves a procedure where a doctor “punches the back of [a fetus’] skull and then evacuates the brain.” And he concluded their discussion of the topic by comparing abortions to the “slaughter” of his grandchildren.
“Are you seeing any shift in woman toward you in relation to these issues? Because I would think that the average woman loves children,” Robertson said. “I have 14 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. I love those children, and to think that you’d want to slaughter those children — the average woman is compassionate and loving.”
“Well I’ll let you know on November 8th,” Trump replied.
Trump and Robertson’s extreme rhetoric about abortion doesn’t track with reality. No one is having abortions during the ninth month of pregnancy, and Clinton’s position on abortion rights doesn’t mean she supports infanticide.
Under Roe v. Wade, women have the right to terminate a pregnancy up until the point when a fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which generally occurs between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy.
According to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 91 percent of abortions in the United States in 2012 were performed before a woman had been pregnant for 13 weeks, or at least 10 weeks before a fetus can possible be “viable.”
And, as Clinton mentioned during the debate, women who have abortions past 13 weeks gestation often do so because of health issues. Last week, a story from Alyson Draper, a Utah woman who decided to have an abortion after learning that one of her twin fetuses had died in the womb and the other had a severe birth defect, went viral as a response to Trump’s rhetoric.
“I shared my story because I wanted people to understand that late-term abortions aren’t what Trump described, and that women can end up in this terrible situation who desperately wanted a baby,” Draper wrote on Facebook.