The First Felon, always eager to slur somebody, uncorked a doozy at his latest rally.
As his raucous crowd booed and screamed, Trump described a hideous scenario that he insists Democrats approve of. “The baby is born,” said Trump. “The mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully” — at this, he seemed to mime rocking an infant — “and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” He made a chopping motion with his hand.
Trump was elaborating on the willfully misunderstood words of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, who, in a radio interview in January, responded to a Republican hypothetical about a woman requesting an abortion during labor.
The nightmare scenario promoted by Trump et. al. is grotesque and doesn’t happen. It does sometimes happen, albeit rarely thanks to modern technology, that a non-viable child is born; when it does, yes, the parents and the physician have a hard and painful decision to make.
As this Mother Jones graphic shows, those are a — literally — vanishingly small number of cases.
A bill undertaking to address this all-but-nonexistent problem was passed by the North Carolina legislature a few weeks ago and, properly, Governor Cooper vetoed it. But the anti-abortion lobby has found a potent tool for exciting ignoramuses, and it is all-but-certain that cynics will exploit the malicious trope of looming infanticide. Get ready.