CLAIM: Kamala Harris repeated a false claim that Trump wants an abortion “monitor.”
VERDICT: FALSE. Trump has never said anything like that; this is a false claim that Harris has used before.
Vice President Kamala Harris falsely claimed in the ABC News presidential debate on Tuesday evening in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that former President Trump has proposed appointing an abortion “monitor.”
Breitbart News fact-checked this claim when she made it at the Democratic National Convention:
The source for Kamala Harris’s claim would appear to be the much-maligned “Project 2025” of the Heritage Foundation, which Trump disavowed. The 922-page document says nothing about an “anti-abortion coordinator.”
It does, however, say that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should collect better data about abortion outcomes, and ensure that miscarriages are not being conflated with abortion. It refers to a proposed bill, called the “Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2023,” proposed by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA). The short bill calls for mandatory reporting of abortion data by states, which currently only report such data voluntarily.
But it, too, says nothing about an “anti-abortion coordinator.”
It appears that Kamala Harris’s speechwriters simply made up the idea, perhaps hoping that questions about it would force Trump to deny it — and, in doing so, to repeat the claim.
Kamala Harris has never provided the basis for this claim, which is calculated to scare voters, but is simply untrue.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
