Fox News Host Fact-Checks Donald Trump After Interview

Fox News host Howard Kurtz fact-checked former President Donald Trump on Sunday following an interview in which he shared an oft-repeated false claim about abortion.

The exchange began during an interview Kurtz conducted with Trump, who is now the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee, in which the host asked if he would support a nationwide abortion ban after 16 weeks of pregnancy, a proposal he has reportedly supported in private, but declined to commit to one way or the other in public.

In response, Trump noted how the three conservative justices he appointed to the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 and the federal abortion protections it provided. He also echoed claims he has made in the past, claiming that his Democratic opponents support abortions “after the baby is born.” In the interview, the former president cited remarks made about the notion by former Democratic Virginia Governor Ralph Northam.

“They did and you know, they did something that from a lot of standpoints is extremely good, number one, the Democrats are the radicals on this issue because it’s okay to have an abortion in seven, eight, nine months and even after birth,” Trump said. “We want to help women with Roe, you take a look at what was going on: abortions in the seventh, eighth, and ninth month. One thing that you say is nobody wants that killing of a baby after the baby’s born.”

A shortened clip began circulating on social media in 2019 of Northam appearing to say that an infant could be killed after birth.

“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam said at the time in a radio interview. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

The clip, however, left out a part where Northam clarified that this would only be done with a severely deformed, nonviable fetus, an infant that was stillborn or would die imminently.

Following the interview, Kurtz corrected Trump’s claims about abortion, which have long been contested or debunked. No lawmakers support the killing of an infant after it is born for reasons pertaining to their support of the medical procedure. Late-term abortions, those taking place in the third trimester, are also exceedingly rare, despite how often they are invoked by anti-abortion advocates, being undertaken mostly in severe and emotionally fraught cases where dangerous fetal abnormalities, non-viable fetuses, or threats to the mother’s health are discovered.

Kurtz also noted that Northam later corrected the record about his comments.

“On late-term abortions, former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam did say that in cases of severe deformity or non-viable fetus, the mother and doctors would decide what to do once the baby was born,” Kurtz said. “But later backed off, with a spokesperson saying he was not talking about killing babies, but extremely rare and tragic cases. A CDC survey says fewer than 1 percent of all abortions take place at or after seven months of pregnancy.”

Newsweek reached out to Trump’s office via email on Sunday afternoon for comment.

What the Polls Show

According to a 2023 poll by Gallup, 34 percent of Americans thought that abortions should be legal under any circumstances; a majority of 51 percent believed it should be legal under certain circumstances; while only 13 percent believed it should be illegal in all circumstances.

The percentage of Republicans who believed abortion should be illegal in all circumstances had actually dropped from 15 percent in 2021 to 8 percent in 2023, according to Gallup data. A majority of 66 percent of GOP voters thought abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, while 24 percent believed it should be legal in all circumstances.