CLAIM: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) appeared to deny that sweeping abortion legislation he signed in 2023 allows abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy.
Verdict: False. Walz made Minnesota the first in the nation to codify abortion via legislative action after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Minnesota is now one of nine states, including Washington, DC, that has no restrictions on abortion, meaning abortion would technically be legal in the final month of pregnancy.
CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell asked 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 ‘in the ninth month’ is absolutely fine. Yes or no?”
Walz dodged the question, not replying “yes” or “no,” and instead said, “That’s not what the bill says.” He later claimed that what he did in Minnesota was “restore Roe v. Wade.”
However, Walz signed a bill, called Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act, which allows abortion throughout pregnancy in the state. The bill explicitly states that “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.”
In also states that “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,” and claims that the principles established in the Minnesota Constitution ensure a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom.”
The bill contains no gestational restrictions on abortion or restrictions for any other reason.
Abortion was already legal in Minnesota through the second trimester before he signed the bill. The bill’s author, Sen. Jennifer McEwen (D), said at the time that the bill enshrines abortion access, no matter what future courts decide.
At the time, Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) blasted the law as “extreme, inhumane, and harmful to women and children who deserve so much better.”
MCCL Co-Executive Director Cathy Blaeser said:
The PRO Act means a right to abort any baby for any reason at any time up to birth. It means that the elective killing of a human being in utero is perfectly legal even in the third trimester of pregnancy, when the child can feel excruciating pain and could live outside the womb. It means that parents have no right to know when their teenage daughter has been taken to undergo an abortion.
“Gov. Walz’s absolutist abortion policy puts Minnesota in the company of just a small handful of countries around the world, including North Korea and China. It is extreme, inhumane, and harmful to women and children who deserve so much better,” Blaeser continued.
Left-leaning, pro-abortion media outlets often downplay abortions performed late in pregnancy and babies who are born alive in botched abortions, sometimes by outright denial.
There is disagreement on what the term “late-term abortion” actually means. Pro-abortion organizations often reject the term and say the official medical definition of “late-term” would mean 41 weeks, or past full-term. The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute has called the definition of late-term abortion “imprecise and shifting” but has generally defined it as abortion later in pregnancy, typically when babies can survive outside of the womb, “with instances of survival occurring at 22 weeks gestation or slightly earlier.”
Thousands of unborn babies are killed in abortions after 21 weeks of pregnancy every year in the U.S. The media frames the loss of thousands of unborn lives as rare because late-term abortions make up a small percentage of abortions overall.
For example, there were 625,978 legal induced abortions recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2021. One percent of those were after 21 weeks, which is more than 6,000 post-viability babies killed in abortions. The pro-abortion Guttmacher institute estimated that more than one million abortions were performed in 2023, which by CDC estimates could mean at least 10,000 late-term abortions were performed that year.
Left-wing media have also interviewed abortionists who perform the procedure late in pregnancy, ultimately admitting that abortions have taken place in the final weeks of pregnancy for various reasons, including because the are “unwanted.”
It should be noted that most abortion clinics across the U.S. say they do not perform abortions in the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy. NBC News found that only five abortion clinics in the country abort unborn babies after 28 weeks. Abortion Finder, a pro-abortion resource backed by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, estimates that there are as many as eight, including one in Maryland that allegedly performs abortions at up to 35 weeks and six days — approximately a day short of being considered the beginning of the ninth month of pregnancy.
According to the left-leaning New Yorker, more “clinics offering late abortion, procedures done at twenty-one weeks or later … have opened in recent years.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
