While interviewing Ron DeSantis, NBC’s Dasha Burns falsely claimed that Democrats don’t back a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
While interviewing Ron DeSantis, NBC’s Dasha Burns falsely claimed that Democrats don’t back a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
I n a new interview with Ron DeSantis, NBC reporter Dasha Burns badly botched an attempted real-time fact-check of the Florida governor’s claim that Democrats are pushing for abortion to be legal until birth.
Burns called DeSantis’s claim a “misrepresentation” and asserted that “there’s no indication of Democrats pushing for that.” But in fact, nearly every Democrat in Congress has voted for legislation that would effectively impose a nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy.
Here’s the transcript of the exchange:
DeSantis: I would not allow what a lot of the left wants to do, which is to override pro-life protections throughout the country all the way up really until the moment of birth in some instances, which I think is infanticide.
Burns: Well, actually, I gotta push back on that because that’s a misrepresentation of what’s happening. I mean 1.3 percent of abortions happen at 21 weeks or higher, and there’s no evidence of Democrats pushing for abortions up until—
DeSantis: Their view is . . . that all the way up into that, that there should not be any legal protections.
Burns: There’s no indication of Democrats pushing for that.
First, Burns pointed to the fact that 1.3 percent of abortions happen at 21 weeks or later, but 1.3 percent of 930,000 total abortions still equals 12,000 unique human beings killed each year at 21 weeks or later, when babies are capable of feeling pain and sometimes capable of surviving outside of the womb. There are fewer than 12,000 total gun homicides in the United States each year. Burns, in an attempt to minimize the horror of late-term abortion, actually ended up agreeing that late-term abortions do in fact happen in the United States.
The relevant question then is whether Democrats think those abortions should be legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy, and the answer is an unequivocal “yes.”
Several Democratic senators — including John Fetterman, Bernie Sanders, and Ben Cardin — openly admit that they oppose any legal limits on abortion at any point in pregnancy, which is the position of a majority of Democratic voters.
There are some blue states, such as Colorado, that explicitly allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason. Many advocates of late-term abortion often claim that post-viability abortions are only performed when there is a fatal fetal abnormality, but that’s simply not true. The authors of a 2013 study on late-term abortions reported that “data suggest that most” abortions performed between weeks 20 and 28 of pregnancy are not performed for “reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” (“Little is known about the relatively few abortions occurring in the third trimester,” the same authors reported.) The Atlantic recently profiled a Colorado abortionist who admitted that most of the abortions he performs later than 21 weeks target the physically healthy babies of physically healthy mothers. I am not aware of any prominent Democrat in the country who responded to the Atlantic article by arguing that such elective late-term abortions should be illegal.
Many more blue states — Maryland is a good example — effectively have the same policy as Colorado because of broad exceptions allowing late-term abortions for reasons of mental health. In 2022, every Democrat in Congress except for two voted for a federal bill that would create a national right to post-viability abortions whenever a lone health-care provider determines it is necessary protect the mother’s mental health:
The [Women’s Health Protection Act] creates an absolute right to abortion through the first five to six months of pregnancy, and it mandates legal abortion after viability until birth whenever a lone health-care provider — a term not limited to doctors — determines that the continuation of the pregnancy “would pose a risk” to the patient’s life or “health.” The WHPA’s chief sponsor in the Senate has acknowledged the legislation “doesn’t distinguish” between physical and mental health, and the text of the bill instructs the courts to “liberally construe” the provisions of the act. Courts would therefore look to the definition of “health” found in Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton: “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age. . . . All these factors may relate to health.”
Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama once acknowledged a mental-health exception would be a loophole that swallowed up a prohibition on late-term abortion. The Washington Post Fact Checker acknowledged that “in reality” abortion is legal in many European countries beyond the first trimester because those countries’ first-trimester limits include mental-health exceptions for abortions later in pregnancy. Surely that logic must also apply to federal legislation backed almost unanimously by congressional Democrats. So DeSantis was on solid factual ground when he described their position on abortion.