Tim Walz Calls Killing Babies in Abortions a “Basic Human Right”
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz suffered what critics say was a “disastrous” performance during his only face-to-face showdown with Republican J.D. Vance before the 2024 presidential election, referring to himself as a “knucklehead” who has “become friends with school shooters.” Walz also repeatedly promoted misinformation about the impact of state pro-life protections, calling abortion a “basic human right.”
Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) squared off in their first and only debate of the 2024 election season in New York City Tuesday night, in a debate moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and “Face the Nation” hostess Margaret Brennan.
Walz, who appeared nervous throughout the debate, fumbled out of the gate, confusing Israel with Iran in his first answer. During a discussion of gun violence, Walz explained his transformation from a pro-NRA congressman representing a rural district to a proponent of anti-gun measures. “I’ve become friends with school shooters,” Walz said. “That was perhaps the greatest presidential or vice presidential flop in living memory,” Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) told Tucker Carlson moments after the debate. “It didn’t come across as the speaker intended.” The phrase immediately went viral, with the Republican Party turning Walz’s misstatements into an online meme.
Many pro-life proponents found themselves dissatisfied with both candidates’ statements on abortion.
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Vance continued the 2024 GOP orthodoxy that the federal government has no role in abortion policy. “Donald Trump has been very clear that on the abortion policy specifically, that we have a big country and it’s diverse. And California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona. And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.”
Former President Donald Trump responded to comments about a “national abortion ban” with an all-caps denunciation of advancing the pro-life cause:
“EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT, BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!). LIKE RONALD REAGAN BEFORE ME, I FULLY SUPPORT THE THREE EXCEPTIONS FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER. I DO NOT SUPPORT THE DEMOCRATS RADICAL POSITION OF LATE TERM ABORTION LIKE, AS AN EXAMPLE, IN THE 7TH, 8TH, OR 9TH MONTH OR, IN CASE THERE IS ANY QUESTION, THE POSSIBILITY OF EXECUTION OF THE BABY AFTER BIRTH. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”
Vance also appeared to promote taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization (IVF) — in which 50% and 70% of newly conceived children will die by day six and many survivors will be “selectively reduced” or frozen indefinitely — as a “pro-family” measure. “I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments,” he said. “I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.”
Yet pro-life advocates say the Democratic ticket’s extremism far outstrips the current GOP leadership’s skittishness on the issue. Walz rejected the state-federal distinction, echoing Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s pledge to expand “rights as basic” as abortion to all 50 states. “That’s not how this works. This is a basic human right,” Walz insisted of abortion, which ends a newborn child’s unalienable right to life. “How can we as a nation say that your life and your rights as basic as the right to control your own body is determined on geography?” Walz asked.
Tim Walz “supports abortion through the ninth month,” said SBA Pro-Life America. “No limits. No safeguards to protect women from abortion coercion.” Walz signed a bill eliminating all protections for unborn life until the moment of birth in Minnesota, ending the legal requirement for abortionists to provide appropriate lifesaving care for a baby born alive during a botched abortion, and lifting the mandate to provide aborted babies with a dignified burial (as opposed to disposing of their mutilated bodies at the landfill with discarded medical waste).
Vance has insisted social conservatives will “have a seat at the table” in the Republican Party under his leadership.
Perhaps the most effective pro-life statement of the debate came during the commercials, as national television carried a commercial highlighting Minnesota state data that show, during Walz’s tenure as governor, at least eight babies were born alive during botched abortions. These newborns “died gasping for air,” the ad states, as the viewer hears the sound of babies struggling for breath. “Kamala Harris may have played dumb during the debate on her record of literally voting to allow infanticide to continue, and she may try to ignore her chosen running mate’s decision to hide cases of infanticide in his home state of Minnesota, but the Pro-Life Generation will not ignore a record of radical abortion support that includes allowing lives to be lost after a botched abortion,” said Students for Life Action President Kristan Hawkins in an email to The Washington Stand. (Emphasis in original.)
Walz spread misinformation about abortion without any fact-checking from the moderators. “We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas,” Walz claimed. That assertion gets the data backwards, said Michael New, a professor of political science and social research at the Catholic University of America and a scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. “Taking the data at face value, their report indicates that the maternal-mortality rate in Texas actually declined by 35 percent between 2021 and 2022,” despite the fact that in 2022 the Texas Heartbeat Act “had already taken effect,” wrote New at National Review. “In short, during the year with the strongest pro-life protections in place, the rate of maternal mortality in Texas actually fell by 35 percent.”
Walz further dishonestly claimed that Project 2025, which the Trump campaign has repeatedly denounced, “is going to have a registry of pregnancies” — something Brennan allowed Vance to address and which the report’s author corrected in real time. “Walz outrageously claims the @Prjct2025 section I wrote would create a ‘pregnancy registry’” when the report “merely recommends CDC compile anonymous abortion stats for all 50 states instead of the current 46-47. Walz’s own state collects miscarriage information every year, so it runs a ‘miscarriage registry’ according to his logic,” clarified Roger Severino, a former Trump administration official now serving as a scholar at The Heritage Foundation. “So hypocritical. So dishonest.”
Observers praised Vance’s poise during the interview in the face of one-sided interruptions from O’Donnell and Brennan. Although the debate rules stated that CBS News would leave fact-checking to the candidates and respond only on its own website, Brennan attempted to downplay the impact of tens of thousands of Haitian migrants on the city of Springfield, Ohio, by stating they were “legal” immigrants.
“The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check, and since you’re fact checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” said Vance, speaking over attempts by moderators to shut him down. He correctly explained that the Biden-Harris administration had used the CBP One app and other means to open up “legal” pathways of temporary residence to applicants who otherwise would be illegal immigrants. Indeed, CBS News reported last July that “[t]he Biden administration has welcomed over half a million migrants under programs designed to reduce illegal border entries or offer a safe haven to refugees, using a 1950s law to launch the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history, unpublished government data obtained by CBS News show.”
Walz said, while “I don’t talk about my faith a lot,” he believed Matthew 25 supported the Biden-Harris administration’s chaotic border policy.
Vance repeatedly underscored Kamala Harris’s responsibility for the deterioration of the American dream and the fraying of national security over the last four years. “Who has been the vice president for the last three-and-a-half years?” he asked Walz early in the debate. “The answer is your running mate, not mine.” Vance repeatedly underscored that Kamala Harris is the sitting vice president and could enact her often-vague policy proposals today, if she wished, while contrasting the bleak Biden-Harris record with that of Donald Trump. “Donald Trump’s economic plan is not just a plan, but it’s also a record,” he said.
Vance noted that, as president, Trump held the line on expanding America’s war footprint and — aside from the COVID-19 lockdowns — presided over an administration marked by prosperity and increasing take-home pay for the middle class. “When was the last time that an American president didn’t have a major conflict break out? The only answer is during the four years that Donald Trump was president,” Vance said. Walz attempted to blame Iran’s advancing nuclear program on “Donald Trump’s fickle leadership,” but Vance countered that Iran and its proxies attacked Israel “during the administration of Kamala Harris,” which has opened up billions of previous frozen dollars to Tehran.
The moderators’ choice of questions also came under fire. Norah O’Donnell deflected a discussion on Hurricane Helene — which has claimed more than 100 lives and devastated entire communities in Appalachian North Carolina — into a discussion of “climate change.” At one point, Vance described Green alarmism as “weird science.” “The answer to reducing carbon emissions lies in reshoring American manufacturing, which has the highest standards of emission standards,” he pointed out. “What have Kamala Harris’s policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world.”
The moderators have demonstrated bias in the past, noted experts at the Media Research Center. Both moderators questioned whether Donald Trump bore the blame for political violence after the Republican presidential candidate’s first near-assassination on July 13. “It’s almost like the rhetoric’s gotten hotter since” January 6, said Norah O’Donnell one day after the first assassination attempt. “Does Donald Trump bear some responsibility for that? Does he need to change his rhetoric?” Likewise, Brennan put the onus for the Trump assassination attempts on the victim. “This was a traumatic event no doubt for him, but I did notice there was no call for lowering the temperature, condemning all political violence,” said Brennan.
The overwhelming majority (84%) of “CBS Evening News” coverage of Kamala Harris since Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race has been positive, while 79% of news stories featuring Donald Trump have been negative, according to analysis from the Media Research Center.
Tuesday night’s debate appears to provide voters with their final look at the two parties’ candidates before the presidential election on November 5. After Harris and Trump faced off in their first debate (his second of the election cycle) — which Republicans have criticized due to the moderators’ heavy, one-sided fact-checking — Harris demanded a rematch, an offer Trump has steadfastly refused. The former president announced he will not take part in a back-to-back interview for the “60 Minutes” election special Monday night alongside the incumbent Democratic vice president. Harris has proved reticent to grant interviews since Joe Biden bowed to pressure and withdrew from the 2024 presidential election some 72 days before the vice presidential debate.
CNN’s John King summed up the consensus by nearly all pundits of the vice presidential debate: “Republicans were happy tonight and Democrats a little bit nervous.”
The November 5 election takes place in 34 days.
LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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