CLAIM: “And get this: he plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.”
VERDICT: FALSE. Trump has never backed that policy and said abortion is a states’ issue.
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to fire up her party during her nomination acceptance speech on Thursday night by focusing on the issue of abortion, a key concern for the female voters that Democrats hope to bring to the polls.
Along the way, however, she made a bizarre claim: that former President Donald Trump wants to appoint an “anti-abortion coordinator.” Trump has never said anything of the sort, and has repeatedly called abortion a state issue.
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.
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.
