How Misinformation About Abortion Drives Restrictive Abortion Legal guidelines – KFF Well being Misinformation Monitor –

How Misinformation About Abortion Drives Restrictive Abortion Legal guidelines – KFF Well being Misinformation Monitor –

Trump claims abortion is infanticide at election occasions

Woman speaks with a doctor
SDI Productions/Getty Pictures

False claims about abortions later in being pregnant are sometimes unfold to distort perceptions of when and the way usually pregnant folks have abortions. Some have exaggerated these claims even additional, falsely claiming that people need abortions after start. In the course of the presidential debate on September 10, former President Trump falsely claimed that Democrats assist “abortion after start,” equating it with execution. Even if killing a toddler after start is infanticide and unlawful in all states, Trump's assertion sparked outrage amongst anti-abortion advocates, who accepted his phrases as truth.

Some posts after the talk debunked claims that abortion entry was in comparison with infanticide, however different public figures, comparable to former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, repeated equally deceptive statements. Huckabee's Fb put up expressed dismay on the fact-checking in the course of the debate, saying, “I assume [Harris] know that the majority Individuals contemplate late-term abortion to be infanticide.” An Most commenters agreed with the put up, with many calling Trump a “fact.”

False claims equating abortion with infanticide and deceptive claims concerning the prevalence of abortions later in being pregnant have circulated intermittently for many years, with Trump repeating the story a number of occasions this yr. Every time he made this declare, there was a spike in mentions of phrases like “late-term abortion,” “nine-month” and “post-birth” abortions — non-medical phrases that confer with abortions later in being pregnant or that contain infanticide to explain. On the evening of the talk, there have been roughly 105,000 mentions of those phrases on social media and in information articles. The frequent use of “late-term abortion” in social media posts means that the general public has accepted it as a medical time period, regardless of it having no medical which means.

Politicians and abortion advocates usually declare {that a} vital variety of abortions happen late in being pregnant, suggesting that folks stay pregnant for eight or 9 months after which immediately resolve to hunt an abortion. In actuality, abortions sometimes happen later in being pregnant as a result of people obtain new details about their being pregnant, comparable to the invention of significant well being issues within the fetus or mom, or as a result of they have been unable to entry abortion companies earlier. A KFF Difficulty Transient explains how uncommon abortions later in being pregnant truly are.

Polling Insights:

Abortions at or after 21 weeks are unusual, accounting for 1% of all abortions within the US. Nonetheless, KFF's March Well being Monitoring Ballot discovered widespread misunderstandings among the many public about when most abortions happen. Most adults (67%), together with comparable numbers of ladies and men, are unaware that lower than 5 p.c of abortions happen greater than 20 weeks into being pregnant, whereas a 3rd of adults (32%) accurately say that lower than 5 p.c of abortions happen earlier than this level (Determine 1).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *