This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.

At the vice-presidential debate on October 1, 2024, Tim Walz told several lies about abortion and refused to answer questions about his position on third-trimester abortions. For his part, JD Vance made a questionable claim about Minnesota abortion law and squandered an opportunity to make a powerful pro-life argument.

In this article, I will debunk Waltz’s lies about late-term abortion. In a future article, I will discuss his claims about maternal health.

Walz’s Position on Third-Trimester Abortion and MinnesotaLaw

Norah O’Donnell, the moderator of the debate, asked Walz the following question:

Governor Walz, after Roe v. Wade was overturned, you signed a bill into law that made Minnesota one of the least restrictive states in the nation when it comes to abortion. Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion quote “in the ninth month” is absolutely fine, yes or no, is that what you support?

In response, Walz talked about trusting women and gave cases where women suffered medical malpractice that he blamed on laws restricting abortion. But he didn’t answer the question.

Vance mentioned a 2023 bill, which Walz signed into law, that codified the “right to abortion” in Minnesota with no restrictions, legalizing abortion for the whole of pregnancy. Vance pointed out that that law, which Governor Walz supported, allowed abortions up until birth.

Walz denied this, saying:

That’s not what the bill says…[I]n Minnesota, what we did was restore Roe v. Wade. We made sure that we put women in charge of their health care.

Later, O’Donnell asked again if Walz supported abortion through all nine months, and he again refused to answer the question and doubled down on his denial that the 2023 law legalized third-trimester abortions:

Norah O’Donnell: Governor, would you like to respond, and also answer the question about restrictions?

Waltz: Yeah, well, the question got asked, and Donald Trump made the accusation that wasn’t true about Minnesota.

So, what does the law say? Later, I’ll quote its full text, but for now, I’ll just quote the relevant parts:

Every individual who becomes pregnant has a fundamental right to… obtain an abortion…

 Every individual who becomes pregnant has a fundamental right to continue the pregnancy and give birth, or obtain an abortion, and to make autonomous decisions about how to exercise this fundamental right…

A local unit of government may not regulate an individual’s ability to freely exercise the fundamental rights set forth in this section in a manner that is more restrictive than that set forth in this section.

So, the law gives no gestational limit for abortions and says that no further restrictions (including restrictions against abortions in the ninth month) will be allowed.

Abortion then, is legal for any reason in Minnesota, all the way up until birth.

Not only does the law, as written, allow for third-trimester abortions for any reason (and forbid any restriction of them) Democratic supporters of the law rejected a proposed amendment that would’ve made third-trimester abortions illegal unless the pregnant person’s life was in danger.

So, Governor Walz, as well as the politicians supporting the passage of the law, knew for certain that it would allow third-trimester abortions for any reason. They rejected an amendment saying otherwise. There was no confusion about what the law really meant.

(Whether abortions are actually done in the third trimester, and why they are done, is outside the purview of this article, but I will direct you here and here.)

Babies Born Alive After Abortions and the Minnaota Law

Later, JD Vance says:

The statute that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.

Walz responds, “That’s not what the law says.”

Vance repeated the accusation, and Walz repeated his denial.

And Walz is right.

Here is the full text of the law:

For purposes of this section, “reproductive health care” means health care offered, arranged, or furnished for the purpose of preventing pregnancy, terminating a pregnancy, managing pregnancy loss, or improving maternal health and birth outcomes. Reproductive health care includes, but is not limited to, contraception; sterilization; preconception care; maternity care; abortion care; family planning and fertility services; and counseling regarding reproductive health care.

(a)  Every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health, including the fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care.

(b)  Every individual who becomes pregnant has a fundamental right to continue the pregnancy and give birth, or obtain an abortion, and to make autonomous decisions about how to exercise this fundamental right…

The Minnesota Constitution establishes the principles of individual liberty, personal privacy, and equality. Such principles ensure the fundamental right to reproductive freedom.

A local unit of government may not regulate an individual’s ability to freely exercise the fundamental rights set forth in this section in a manner that is more restrictive than that set forth in this section.

There is nothing in it about allowing the deaths of babies born alive after abortions.

The law does say that no restrictions can be placed on abortion. One could argue that once a baby is born alive, the issue is infanticide, not abortion. But I’ll leave it up to legal scholars to determine whether the law would make it harder to protect babies born alive.

Unfortunately, Vance didn’t say that the law could be interpreted in a way that would make it more difficult for politicians to protect infants born alive. Instead, he claimed the law said these babies could be left to die. And that is clearly untrue.

Whether you call it a lie, a half-truth, or just poor wording on Vance’s part, he’s left himself wide open to pro-abortion fact-checkers. All a fact-checker has to do is look up the law and see what it says. I’m sure sites like Politico will have a field day with this exchange. All nuance of what the law might mean (beyond what it actually says) will be lost.

…But Tim Walz Opposes Protecting Newborns

Instead, Vance should have brought up how Tim Walz voted against protecting babies born alive after abortions while in Congress. When H.R. 4712, the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, came before the House of Representatives in 2019, Walz initially voted in favor of it.

However, Walz sent a memo to the Speaker of the House asking that his “yes” vote be changed to a “no.” He said he voted yes in error. In a tweet, he let his constituents know that he was opposed to the bill and was against any protections for babies born alive after abortions.

He also reminded voters he had voted against similar protections for born-alive babies before.

Here is the tweet he sent, where he called the vote an “honest mistake”:

Vance could’ve pointed this out, and fact-checkers couldn’t have disproved it.

Vance could’ve further mentioned that the idea of babies being born alive in Minnesota isn’t just hypothetical. It’s happened.

Official records show that five abortion procedures resulted in live births between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021.

In one instance, the baby had a fetal anomaly, and the report says the baby died from it. The other babies were healthy, and none were given medical care, even though the report admits that two were “viable.”

The report says, “Comfort care measures were provided as planned and the infant did not survive.”

What is “Comfort Care”?

Comfort care consists of simply wrapping the baby in a blanket and letting him or her die. Nurse Jill Stanek testified about what that was like in the hospital where she worked:

In the event that an aborted baby is born alive, she or he receives “comfort care,” defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until s/he dies. Parents may hold the baby if they wish. If the parents do not want to hold their dying aborted baby, a staff member cares for the baby until s/he dies…

One night, a nursing co-worker was taking a Down’s syndrome baby who was aborted alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived.

In 2019, again according to the official state record, three babies were born alive after abortions in Minnesota. None of these babies were given life-saving measures, and all three died.

Vance could have spoken about Walz’s voting record and the official reports of babies born alive in Minnesota. He missed an important opportunity to share these facts with voters. Although media outlets can always lie (we’ve seen this quite a bit in recent months) no honest fact-checker could have denied Walz’s voting record or the official state reports citing babies born alive.  

But instead, Vance handed them something they could easily disprove.

When pro-lifers aren’t accurate, it plays right into the hands of abortion supporters, who use it to tarnish the reputation of all pro-lifers and convince the public not to believe us.

Perhaps some could blame Vance’s inaccuracy on poor wording rather than dishonesty. You can make no such excuses for Walz. His statement about Texas’s maternal mortality rate is even more blatantly untrue than his characterization of Minnesota’s law, but we’ll get to that in my next article.

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Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 900 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies.

Sarah Terzo is a supporter of the Consistent Life Ethic, a philosophy that values all human life from conception to natural death and opposes war, the death penalty, euthanasia, abortion, and all forms of government-sanctioned violence. CLE supporters also work for racial justice and advocate for the poor and disadvantaged, in the US and abroad.