This Minnesota mother detests Trump's lies about abortion

Tippy Amundson's family on vacation in August. From left: Eastton, Tippy, Chris, Elliott and Everett. Free photo.

Brooklyn Park mom Tippy Amundson decorated the nursery for her first baby, who was 20 weeks pregnant.

“I could feel him moving and we were planning and expecting for our family,” she told me recently.

Then a doctor gave her the tragic news: Because her baby didn't have a secure attachment to the placenta, it wasn't receiving nutrients and had stopped developing between 12 and 15 weeks. He still had a heartbeat, but he had abnormalities that were “incompatible with life” – words that every expectant mother fears.

Worse still, the placenta grew into her uterus. So if they didn't act quickly, her doctor told her, she could lose both her baby and her uterus and be unable to bear children in the future.

This happened in August 2016, six years before the US Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, but the stigma surrounding abortions later in pregnancy was so great that North Memorial Robbinsdale — the health system where she would later give birth to three boys — wouldn't do it, so she ended up at Planned Parenthood in St. Paul .

Their grief and trauma returns every time Donald Trump speaks out about abortion, most recently during the first presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris when he made the false claim that Minnesota was allowing child murder.

“But your choice for vice president says an abortion in the ninth month is absolutely OK. He also says that execution after birth is an execution and no longer an abortion, because the baby is born, that's fine. 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.

This is murder.

You can never be entirely sure what the watch salesman/GOP presidential candidate is talking about, but my guess is he's referring to a Minnesota law change in 2023. Here is the one old statute:

A child born alive as a result of an abortion is fully recognized as a human person and receives immediate legal protection. The responsible medical personnel must take all appropriate measures in accordance with good medical practice, including the preparation of appropriate medical records, to protect the life and health of the live-born infant.

It was changed accordingly:

An infant born alive is fully recognized as a human person and receives immediate protection under the law. The responsible medical personnel must take all appropriate measures in accordance with good medical practice, including the preparation of appropriate medical records, to care for the child born alive.

Anti-abortion activists are fixed about changing the word “preserve” to “maintain”. However, keep in mind that the law still states that the child should be “fully recognized as a human person,” which makes killing the child illegal.

The problem with the previous law was that it could be interpreted as requiring extraordinary measures that would temporarily “preserve” the child's life while at the same time exacerbating his suffering before his inevitable death.

This also created an even greater risk from the use of labor and abortion—when drugs are used to induce labor so a woman can give birth—which, in hindsight, Tippy Amundson would have chosen for the baby boy she and her husband had named Emmitt if she knew it was available to her.

“It would have allowed me to see my baby’s face and hold him,” she told me.

Instead, she was subjected to Trump's monstrous rhetoric.

“It's terrible to have to hear him speak like that to me and so many mothers who find themselves in this tragic situation,” Amundson said.

Trump's denigration of Walz and the people of Minnesota is wrong for another reason.

Listening to Trump, you might think that all we do here in the North is kill babies. However, state data shows it that in 2021, only 8% of Amundson-like abortions were performed in the second trimester, while a single abortion was performed on the threshold of the third trimester, at 28 weeks.

In other words, this scenario is vanishingly rare, and when it does occur, it is a tragedy to be mourned, not a spectacle to be creepily exploited.

Trump also denigrated Minnesota's medical community, many of whom advocated for Minnesota to become a health care haven for women in the Upper Midwest.

He turned doctors into murderers.

“It is immoral to bring up the specter of infanticide when it does not exist,” Dr. Siri Fiebiger. She is the past chair of the Minnesota Section of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “We all swore not to cause harm and – hopefully – to help.”

Fiebiger told me that these abortions, when she performed them, were medically necessary and were always approved by a hospital ethics committee. Family support services often included a chaplain.

The infanticide smear is harmful because it undermines the trust between doctors and their patients, which is crucial when complications arise. And they happen often. If a fetus develops heart failure due to abnormalities, The mother can also develop heart failure through a mysterious process called “mirroring.” After the so-called a premature rupture of membranes – For example, if a woman's water breaks early – infections can develop, Fiebiger told me.

(Maybe you don't know about these things because our society has decided they're gross and shouldn't be talked about.)

Meanwhile, Trump's vice presidential running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance, whom Walz will face in the only vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, also has strong views on abortion. And by strong I mean Matt Birk – should women really work? mood, including previous support for a national abortion ban.

Let's hope Walz informs America that Vance has objected to new Biden administration rules limiting law enforcement access to reproductive health care records.

As Josh Marshall reported In July's Talking Points Memo, Vance was one of only 28 members of Congress – imagine how wild you have to be to qualify for Congress The Group – which objected to the rule in a Letter 2023.

When Texas makes it illegal for a resident to travel elsewhere for an abortion, Vance wants to make sure the Texas Rangers have the opportunity to access her medical records.

Not if Tippy Amundson has anything to say about it. She was born into a religious family that was anti-abortion, and the last thing she could have imagined would be becoming an abortion rights advocate. She and her husband have three boys, and she is 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 a responsibility 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 to you that a law or policy has not affected you. But just wait until it happens.”

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