Trump, Biden debate abortion as Florida prepares to decide constitutional amendment
In the first ever debate between a president and former president, Joe Biden and Donald Trump attacked each other over abortion Thursday night on CNN, with both distorting their opponent’s positions.
Biden claimed Trump would ban abortion outright, even though Trump has said on the campaign trail that he would not. Trump said Biden would allow doctors to kill babies after birth, repeating a falsehood that he has said in recent months.
To support the claim, Trump made a reference to the former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, whose 2019 comments in a radio interview have been distorted for years by abortion hardliners to say that Democrats support infanticide. In the interview, Northam was discussing legislation in Virginia and a hypothetical situation in which a mother’s life was in danger during delivery involving a severely deformed or non-viable fetus.
“He’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby,” Trump said at the debate.
But doctors and experts say babies aren’t aborted after birth. And while abortions do take place into the third trimester due to medical emergencies even in states with strict laws, federal data shows that they are incredibly rare.
In Trump’s home state of Florida, the question of how late abortions should be allowed to take place has been key to the debate over a November ballot question that would enshrine access to an abortion up to “viability” in the state constitution. The proposed constitutional amendment would give doctors broad leeway to decide whether abortions should be prescribed.
Responding to Trump, Biden on Thursday said that he does not support unfettered “late-term” abortions, but that the decision should be left to doctors and mothers.
“Roe v Wade does not provide for that,” Biden said about Trump’s characterizations. “That’s not the circumstance. Only when a woman’s life is in danger, when she’s gonna die, that’s the only circumstance where that can happen. But we are not for late-term abortion.”
Trump, who successfully nominated three conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court during his four years as president, also claimed victory for the overturning of Roe v Wade. The 2022 decision by the high court returned the power to comprehensively regulate abortion to the states.
“Everybody wanted to get it back to the states,” said Trump.
President Biden said, as he has claimed before, that he would support reinstating Roe v Wade.
“The idea that the founders wanted the politicians to be the ones making decisions on women’s health is ridiculous,” Biden said. “A doctor should be making those decisions; that’s how it should be run. If I’m elected, I’m gonna restore Roe v Wade.”
Biden said that if his opponent gets elected and Republicans control Congress they would pass a universal ban on abortion, and that Trump would sign it. “At six weeks or seven or eight to 10 weeks; something very, very conservative.”
Trump, however, said in April that he would not sign a national abortion ban.
