Biden Struggles to Respond to Trump’s ‘Kill the Baby’ Abortion Lie

Tessa Stuart

27 June 2024 at 10:48 pm·4-min read

Donald Trump stood on stage in Atlanta on Thursday night and told an insane lie: Democrats, he said, want to “kill the baby.”

“They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth — after birth — if you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this. He said, ‘We’ll put the baby aside, and will determine what we do with the baby,’ meaning: We’ll kill the baby.”

This was an easy one, practically teed-up for President Joe Biden: Late-term abortions are extremely rare — only 1 percent of abortions in the United States take place any later than 21 weeks, or half-way through the fifth month of pregnancy — and when they do, it is almost always because some unthinkable tragedy has occurred: a fatal fetal abnormality, or a life-threatening pregnancy complication. (These were the types of circumstances that Ralph Northam, the former governor of Virginia, was referring to in an old interview that Trump mischaracterized on Thursday night.)

But Biden couldn’t have fumbled the exchange more spectacularly, beginning by quibbling over whether or not constitutional scholars agreed that Roe was wrongly decided (honestly, at this point, who cares?), then referencing Georgia’s 6-week abortion ban, before veering inexplicably into a story about Laken Riley, the nursing student allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant.

“Look, there are so many young women who have been, including a young woman who just was murdered, and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in — they talk about that. But here’s the deal. There’s a lot of young women to be raped by their, by their in-laws, by their, by their spouses, brothers and sisters,” Biden said. “It’s just ridiculous.”

… I’m sorry, what? What a disaster.

Unfortunately, if you care about access to abortion, birth control, and IVF, there has always been a clear choice between the two ancient men running for president this year — even if it’s not a choice that the supporters of reproductive rights can be enthusiastic about.

On the one hand you have Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic who repeatedly demonstrated over the course of his political career that he was no friend or champion of reproductive rights. This is the man who told a reporter in 1974, “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body,” and who reiterated that position for decades, all the way through the mid-aughts. (“I do not view abortion as a choice and a right,” Biden said in 2006.)

Biden experienced a late-in-life conversion to the cause, abandoning his decades-long support to the Hyde Amendment and expressing his support for constitutional protections for “a woman’s right to choose” when he ran for president in 2019.

To his credit, as president, Biden has expanded access to the abortion pill and issued guidance that EMTALA includes emergency abortions, even as he has remained visibly uncomfortable with the idea of abortion. (According to one tally, Biden had been in office for 224 days before his office used the word ‘abortion’ itself in a press statement, and it was 468 days before he uttered it aloud.)

But Biden looks like the radical feminist reincarnation of Margaret Sanger compared to his rival. The once “very pro-choice” Trump became the architect of American women’s misfortune by installing half of the Supreme Court majority that struck down Roe v. Wade. Because of that decision, one in five American women of reproductive age live in states where abortion is banned.

And, unfortunately, it could get much, much worse for anyone who can get pregnant in America, if Trump is reelected. Not only will there continue to be questions about a federal abortion ban, former Trump administration officials have begun laying the groundwork for plans to revoke FDA approval of mifepristone, implement an “abortion surveillance” program that would track who obtained abortions and where, revive the Comstock Act, an 18th century vice law that prohibited the mailing of any implements involved in abortion.

The presidential debate on Thursday night was an opportunity for Biden to draw a clear contrast between his record, as president, on reproductive rights, and the potential disaster looming if Trump is elected again. Instead this critical moment devolved into a barely coherent back-and-forth about what constitutional scholars thought about Roe v. Wade in a broader exchange filled with missed opportunities, distortions, and outright lies.

Americans deserve so much better.

More from Rolling Stone

Best of Rolling Stone

HuffPost UK
Trevor Phillips Destroys Nigel Farage With One Devastating Question
The Reform UK leader rejected the accusation that his party is a home for racists.
The Telegraph
Old, rich and living on benefits: welcome to the state pension capital of Britain
East Preston feels an unlikely stronghold of benefits dependency. The genteel village on the West Sussex coast might be the closest thing that Britain has to a moneyed pensioner utopia.
The Independent
Led by Donkeys interrupt Nigel Farage speech by lowering huge Putin banner
Nigel Farage was initially unaware that the Russian president was on the poster, with the words ‘I heart Nigel’ written below
The Telegraph
Did Nigel Farage blow himself up in the BBC Question Time election special? Our writers react
It was finally Nigel Farage’s time to appear before a BBC Question Time audience this evening, more than a week after Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer had theirs. The Reform UK leader took the podium in the same hour as a Green Party representative, Adrian Ramsay. Yet only one of these men has excited reaction from our writers.
Manchester Evening News
'I gave up Diet Coke for a month and I couldn't believe how it transformed my life'
Paul Turner was stunned by the results
The Telegraph
Labour vote share falls to lowest in more than two years
Labour’s vote share has fallen to its lowest level in more than two years ahead of the general election, new polling shows.
HuffPost
Critics Clown Trump's 'IDIOTIC' Electric Planes Remarks: 'Dumb As A Box Of Rocks'
"What happens if the sun isn’t shining while you’re up in the air?” the former president asked at a rally in Virginia.
The Telegraph
A Labour landslide would leave the UK unrecognisable
Until now, Sir Keir Starmer has carefully hidden the Labour Party’s radical, hard-Left agenda from the public. But on the brink of the largest majority in nearly a century, his mask has slipped.
CNN
A year ago, she drank battery acid to escape life under the Taliban. Today, she has a message for other Afghan girls
Arzo survived a suicide attempt but now faces a new threat that could send her family – and millions like them – back to Afghanistan and a life that has become so intolerable for women and girls that some would rather die.
The Telegraph
The healthiest oils to cook with and the ones to avoid
Oil is the ultimate kitchen staple, used for everything from sautéing and deep frying to roasting and pouring into salad dressings. Extra virgin olive oil is renowned for its health benefits – but is it the right choice for every culinary task? The answer is complicated.
The Telegraph
Jill Biden has the fate of the world in her hands
Now might be a good time for Dr Jill Biden, the First Lady, to have a rummage around in the back of the wardrobe for one particular item of clothing. When Joe Biden opted against running for president in 2004, his decision was underlined by his wife’s decision to wear a halter top with the word “NO” scrawled on her stomach.
The Telegraph
‘Trillion dollar trainwreck’: US super stealth fighter is eating the next generation
All of a sudden, the US Air Force is considering cancelling a multibillion-dollar effort to develop a new stealth fighter. Citing the high cost of the so-called “Next-Generation Air Dominance” programme and the competing demands of other projects, USAF leaders have warned they may have no choice but to cancel NGAD – and find other ways of winning control of the air in future wars.
The Daily Beast
Obama Rode to Biden’s Rescue—but Intervention Could Yet Come
On Friday afternoon, in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump, private murmurs and public calls for an “intervention” ricocheted through Democratic circles. But then a hold-up emerged.Some 17 hours after Biden botched his big debate moment, his former boss came to the rescue.For many high-ranking Democrats, a single tweet from former President Barack Obama appeared to nix any chance of the 44th president meeting with the 46th and urging him to drop out.Rea
Sky video
France election: Marine Le Pen on the brink of power, as Emmanuel Macron's big gamble looks set to fail
In France, politics is happening at a ferocious pace.
The Telegraph
How do you get rid of a dictator? Here are some tips
In an age when dictators and authoritarian regimes are all the rage, it becomes all the more imperative for peace-loving democrats to consider ways of getting rid of them. Yet on some happy – albeit rare – occasions, the more repellent members of the dictatorial species, by dint of incompetence or arrogance, manage to do the job themselves.
PA Media: UK News
Rishi Sunak: I’ll still be Prime Minister on Friday
The Conservative leader defended his party’s record in government against what he described as a ‘declinist narrative’.
Manchester Evening News
'My mortgage has doubled... the country's gone to pot': The Greater Manchester neighbourhood where people want change
'I was born and bred here... I've never known the place be as big of a dump as it is'
The Telegraph
Tory Remainers are the authors of their party’s defeat
The oddity of European politics is that Britain is moving sharply to the Left while most of the Continent is moving even further to the Right. In Britain, young people and even the middle aged are abandoning Conservatism. Elsewhere in Europe, the young are the pillars of a radical Right-wing upsurge. On the Continent, the cause is largely frustration with the consequences of being in the EU. In Britain, it is largely a backlash against being out of it.
The Telegraph
The Conservatives are paying the terrible price for Britain’s lockdown amnesia
On Tuesday, the BBC led with a report about personal protective equipment (PPE) worth nearly £1.5 billion going unused. It was, we were told in scandalised tones, rotting away in warehouses.
The Telegraph
Germany couldn’t afford to bail France out even if it wanted to
The “nein”, “non” or just a plain old “no way” has already been uttered. As France prepares for its most significant election in at least a decade, with its leading parties committed to increasing the government’s already lavish spending, Christian Lindner, the German finance minister, has made one point clear: France is not going to get a bailout, and certainly not from its close neighbours.

Latest stories