Brooklyn Park mom Tippy Amundson was decorating the nursery for her first baby, about 20 weeks pregnant.
“I could feel him move, and we planned and anticipated for our family,” she told me recently.
Then a doctor gave her tragic news: Because her baby had no secure attachment to her placenta, he wasn’t getting nutrients and had stopped developing between 12 and 15 weeks. He still had a heartbeat, but he would have abnormalities “not compatible with life” — words every expectant mother dreads.
Worse still, the placenta was growing into her uterus. So if they didn’t move quickly, her doctor told her, she could lose both her baby and her uterus, preventing her from carrying babies in the future.
This was in August 2016, six years before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but the stigma around abortions later in pregnancy was so acute that North Memorial Robbinsdale — the health system where she would later deliver three boys — would not perform the procedure, so she wound up at Planned Parenthood in St. Paul.
Her grief and trauma return every time Donald Trump opens his mouth about abortion, most recently during the first presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, when he made the false claim that Minnesota allows infanticide.
“But her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born is OK. And that’s not OK with me,” Trump said, referring to Gov. Tim Walz.
As the debate moderator pointed out, no state allows the killing of a child after birth.
That’s murder.
One can never be quite sure what the watch salesman/GOP presidential candidate is talking about, but my best guess is that he’s referring to a 2023 change in Minnesota law. Here’s the old statute:
A born alive infant as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.
It was changed to this:
An infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to care for the infant who is born alive.
Anti-abortion activists are fixated on the word “preserve” being changed to “care.” Nevermind that the statute still says the infant “shall be fully recognized as a human person,” which makes killing the child illegal.
As such, it also created even more risk with the the use of labor and delivery abortion — when medication is used to induce labor so a woman will deliver — which in retrospect is what Tippy Amundson would have chosen for the tiny boy she and her husband named Emmitt, if she knew it was available to her.
“It would have allowed me to see my baby’s face and hold my baby,” she told me.
Instead, she’s been subjected to Trump’s monstrous rhetoric.
“It’s awful to have to hear him talk like this, to me and so many mothers who find themselves in this tragic situation,” Amundson says.
Trump’s smear of Walz and the people of Minnesota is wrong for another reason.
Listening to Trump, you’d think we’re just up here in the North killing babies. State data, however, show that in 2021 just 8% of abortions were performed in the second trimester like Amundson’s, while a single abortion was performed on the cusp of the third trimester, at 28 weeks.
In other words, this scenario is vanishingly rare, and when it does occur, it’s a tragedy to be mourned, not a spectacle to be ghoulishly exploited.
Trump is also smearing Minnesota’s medical community, many of whom advocated for making Minnesota a refuge for women’s health care in the Upper Midwest.
He’s turned doctors into murderers.
“To introduce the specter of infanticide into the conversation when it doesn’t exist is immoral,” Dr. Siri Fiebiger told me. She’s the past chair of the Minnesota section of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “We have all taken an oath to do no harm and — hopefully — help.”
Fiebiger told me that when she has performed these abortions, they were medically necessary and always cleared by a hospital ethics committee. Support services for families often included a chaplain.
The infanticide smear is damaging because it erodes trust between doctors and their patients, which is essential when complications arise. And they do frequently arise. When a fetus experiences heart failure due to anomalies, the mother can also go into heart failure in a mysterious process called “mirroring.” After what’s called a premature rupture of membranes — e.g., a woman’s water breaks early — infections can develop, Fiebiger told me.
(You may not know about these things because our society has decided they are icky and shouldn’t be talked about.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance — who Walz will face Tuesday night in the sole vice presidential debate — also has strong views about abortion. And by strong I mean Matt Birk-should-women-really-be-workin? vibes, including previous support for a national abortion ban.
Let’s hope Walz informs America that Vance objected to new rules from the Biden administration that limit law enforcement access to reproductive health care records.
As Josh Marshall reported in Talking Points Memo in July, Vance was one of just 28 members of Congress — imagine how wild-eyed you have to be to qualify for that group — who objected to the rule in a 2023 letter.
So when Texas makes it illegal for a resident to travel elsewhere for an abortion, Vance wants to make sure Texas Rangers have the ability to snoop into her medical records.
Not if Tippy Amundson has anything to say about it. She was born to a religious, anti-abortion family, and the last thing she could have imagined is becoming an abortion rights advocate. She and her husband have three boys, and she’s taking time off from her career as a kindergarten teacher to raise them — and to educate the public about the need for access to safe abortion care.
“I feel compelled to share my story and help people understand that politics affects people’s lives,” she says. “People tell me, ‘Oh, I’m not political.’ What a blessing for you that a law or policy hasn’t hasn’t affected you. But just wait until it does.”
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