Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a recent interview that some states allow abortion after an infant has already been born.
CNN host Jake Tapper asked DeSantis whether he would support a federal abortion ban as president. DeSantis, who signed Florida’s contested six-week abortion ban in April, said he would be a "pro-life president," but gave no direct answer.
"In some liberal states," he said, "you actually have post-birth abortions and I think that’s wrong."
Some on social media thought DeSantis misspoke, but the post-birth abortion claim is something that Republicans and anti-abortion activists have repeated for years, before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
The claim was wrong then, and it is wrong now: Willfully terminating a newborn’s life is not legal in any state.
Gretchen Ely, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville's, college of social work who studies reproductive health, said the claim "couldn’t be more wrong."
She said these types of claims misleadingly try to equate an intervention that might take place in the third trimester when there’s a fetal anomaly with an elective abortion where someone can just decide after birth that they don’t want a baby.
When asked for evidence to support his claim, a DeSantis campaign aide pointed us to two resources, neither of which established that states sanction killing newborns.
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