Guardian reports Trump ‘lied’ about abortion at conference – he didn’t

Originally published August 1, 2024, The Catholic Herald

Former President Donald Trump appeared at a conference of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on 31 July in what turned out to be an often heated and tense panel discussion.

There was much said for the media to pick and choose from. In one of its numerous articles on the conference, almost all of which take Trump to task, the Guardian states that the “Chaotic event hosted by National Association of Black Journalists saw Trump lie about abortion and immigration”.

It’s a bold claim, especially in regard in abortion. One then trawls through the article to find the “lies”. There’s plenty of mention of immigration and Trump’s discussion of Harris’ ethnicity. But nothing on those abortion “lies”.

Then one realizes there is an accompanying video. Sure enough at around 1 minute 50 seconds into the video, it features a clip of Trump discussing abortion and what he describes as the Democrat’s “radical” position by allowing abortion in the “eighth” and “ninth” months of pregnancy, and “allowing the death of a baby after the baby is born”.

The clip is overlaid with the Guardian’s editorial comment: “In one instance, he repeated the lie that Democrats are allowing abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy”.

It’s a bad and biased piece of journalism, as Trump’s comment isn’t a lie. Which is also known as a fact.

The Catholic Herald does not have a position on Donald Trump. It is aware that he is an unpopular with many, including Catholics – Herald columnist Ken Craycraft has written various withering columns criticising Trump; those articles effectively articulate his and many other Catholics’ concerns about the former president, and they cover important issues, and so those articles get published.

But, at the same time, Trump is a former president and is also running for president again, which makes him a public figure of interest, and he also speaks candidly and honestly about abortion – which not many politicians in the US do these days – an important issue, especially for Catholics. Thus when appropriate we report on him, without motivation to either denigrate him or to boost him.

The Catholic Herald also doesn’t have a beef with the Guardian. Recently we noted that out of all the mainstream media, the Guardian had been one of the few publications to provide decent coverage of the opening ceremony fracas in Paris and was willing to acknowledge the level of offence caused to Christians.

Also, only yesterday the Herald ran an article about the Holy See’s concerns on the increasing rhetoric and threats around using nuclear weapons, which drew on a very informative Guardian article about the staggering scale of spending on nuclear weapons. The Guardian often does very solid, investigative reporting.

If the Catholic Herald does have a beef, it is with disingenuous journalism, especially that which misrepresents topics such as abortion that involve the most vulnerable of society, the unborn.

And hence we go back to Trump’s comments at the conference.

For years, the Democrats have consistently rejected opportunities to endorse or pass any limits on abortion – including protections for fully-born babies – and have instead promoted policies that would render the practice effectively unlimited, reports LifeSiteNews, a non-profit Internet news service dedicated to issues of life, family and related issues that was launched to “provide an alternative to the mainstream news that was either ignoring or providing highly slanted reporting” on such issues.

It notes that the wholesome-sounding Democrat-championed Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) would forbid states from passing any law that not only prohibits abortion but would be “reasonably likely to delay or deter” or “indirectly” raise the cost of abortions. 

Admittedly, the bill would “ostensibly let abortion be restricted after foetal viability” similar to other laws on the books – during the NABJ panel discussion, one of the panelists refuted Trump’s claim about late-term abortions, saying it’s “banned” in all States.

The problem with the panelist’s supposition and with those laws, though, has been highlighted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) when it comes to Partial-Birth Abortion (PBA) that occurs in later term pregnancies:

“Such laws exist in most states but they generally have two deficiencies.  First, they apply only after ‘viability’ – when the child if delivered could survive indefinitely outside the womb – and PBA is used to kill mostly-delivered children before this stage. Second, as required by Roe and Casey, even laws restricting abortion after viability allow abortion when it is deemed necessary to preserve the mother’s “health” and “heath” was defined in Roe’s companion case Doe v. Bolton to include “all factors” – emotional, familial, age, and so on – related to ‘well-being’.  This ‘heath’ loophole allows abortions to be performed on request during all nine months of pregnancy for virtually any reason.”

In short, if Trump is lying, so are the US Catholic bishops.

But neither party are. Someone else is lying, or at least misrepresenting the truth about abortion in the US.

Late-term abortions and PBAs are relatively rare – though it should be borne in mind that “rarity” is based on them being set against the colossal numbers of other types of abortions happening.

Either way, as Susan E. Wills notes in her report “Partial-Birth Abortion: A Bridge Too Far By”, which is referenced by the USCCB, “the abortion industry’s defense of this grotesque procedure” ignores the fact that, in the words of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, it is “not just too close to infanticide; it is infanticide, and one would be too many”.

It is also worth noting the following point raised by Wills, and the fact this was written in 2006:

“For years it appeared that journalists had been writing news stories based almost entirely on press releases from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation.

“Initially, some journalists obligingly reported that the partial-birth abortion procedure was extremely rare and performed only in cases of severe foetal anomalies or for serious maternal health reasons. However, skeptical journalists at publications like American Medical News and The [Bergen County] Record did their own research, and discovered that thousands of partial-birth abortions were being done annually, primarily on healthy mothers and healthy babies.

“Americans began to realize that biased or lazy journalists had not given them the full truth about abortion in general.”

It’s now 2024. Abortion remains a major issue in this forthcoming US election, perhaps even the main one, though not in terms of concerns about it occurring too readily or with ever increasing ease and at later stages of a pregnancy, rather in terms of its enshrinement galvanizing the Democrat’s base. And the Guardian just accused Trump of “lying” about abortion.

“The frog-to-princess transmutation has been amazing to watch, but also chilling,” Lionel Shriver writes in the Spectator about the sudden and amazing turnabout and makeover occurring in the media right now over Kamala Harris becoming the presidential nominee for the Democrat ticket in November. “The US no longer enjoys an independent press. The American fourth estate is almost entirely an arm of the Democratic party.”

Shriver goes on to say: “The next do-over will erase Harris’s political record. She’ll be transformed from the formerly second-most left-wing member of the Senate to a safe, sensible, law-and-order centrist.”

Hence apart from the rousing sloganeering that will be reported on, you likely won’t hear much about the finer details, such as how, as the National Review reports, Harris has also sponsored separate legislation to provide federal funding for abortion, with no time limitation in the bill text; and to require state governments to pay for abortions, again with no time limitation in the bill text.

And if Trump tries to address any of that as he takes Kamala Harris on as the election campaign heats up, he’ll likely be shut down by the majority of the media.

Though be warned if you want to know more about that “full truth” about abortion. Reading about Partial-Birth Abortion and the weirdly Byzantine matrix of “guidelines” around it, dependant on if the baby is extracted head first or feet first, and about what can be snipped, snapped or sucked up, conjures images from a horror movie.

Even the information provided by the USCCB is hard enough to get through: “Some abortion doctors use PBA in the middle and last months of pregnancy, when dismembering a child becomes more difficult due to the child’s stronger bones and ligaments. After the mother undergoes two to three days of cervical dilation (increasing her risk of infection and subsequent preterm births), the doctor in minutes can partially deliver the child ‘intact’ before killing him or her and completing delivery. In the more commonly used dismemberment method, the mother’s cervix is dilated manually only enough to remove the child’s severed body parts; dismemberment and removal takes the doctor longer to complete.”

It all conjures up a society deeply and darkly different to the one that one thinks we live in.

Trump appears to be addressing that. Whether mainly motivated by personal feelings about the issue – he is a father and a grandfather, after all – or simply for political gain, or for a mixture of both, who knows. But that shouldn’t change whether and how the media reports on him.