Helena, MT - PolitiFact and KFF Health News found Tim Sheehy’s false claim about Senator Jon Tester’s reproductive health care record “simply doesn’t hold up.”

Experts said Sheehy’s claims “reveals a blatant misunderstanding” of reproductive health care.

Read more below:

PolitiFact: GOP’s Tim Sheehy Revives Discredited Abortion Claims in Pivotal Senate Race
July 9, 2024
Matt Volz

- In a televised debate June 8, Sheehy accused Tester and Democrats of voting for “elective abortions up to and including the moment of birth.” That statement prompted Tester to respond: “To say we’re killing babies at 40 weeks is total BS.” 

- Asked for evidence to support Sheehy’s accusations, Sheehy’s campaign spokesperson, Katie Martin, said the Republican candidate was referring to Tester’s vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act, which failed to pass the Senate in 2022.  

- Alina Salganicoff, a KFF senior vice president and director of the nonprofit’s Women’s Health Policy Program, said nothing in the Women’s Health Protection Act supports an abortion up to the moment of birth.

- Rather, the legislation would allow a health provider to perform abortions without obstacles such as waiting periods, tests deemed medically unnecessary, unnecessary in-person visits, or other restrictions imposed by states. 

- “This is not abortion on demand until the moment of birth,” Salganicoff said. “Even if politicians and anti-abortion activists make this claim, there are no clinicians that provide ‘abortions’ moments before birth.”

- Besides the Women’s Health Protection Act, the Sheehy campaign cited Tester’s opposition to “born-alive” legislation meant to protect babies who survive botched abortions. 

- In 2002, Congress passed a “born-alive” law that gave legal protections to infants who survive abortions. A stalled 2022 bill sought to expand that law to add criminal penalties to health professionals who do not take steps to preserve the life of any child born. Montana voters rejected a similar ballot question in 2022. 

- Tester was elected to the Senate four years after the first bill passed and a vote was not taken on the 2022 measure.

- Just 1% of all abortions in the U.S. happen at or after 21 weeks of gestation. (The percentage of abortions that occur when the fetus is presumed to be viable, 24 weeks or later, is presumably lower, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not break out abortion rates for that period.) 

- But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says “the science conclusively establishes” that a fetus does not have the capacity to feel pain until 24 or 25 weeks. 

- “Every medical organization that has examined this issue and peer-reviewed studies on the matter have consistently reached the conclusion that abortion before this point does not result in the perception of pain in a fetus,” according to the OB-GYN medical group. 

- Katrina Kimport, a professor in the University of California-San Francisco’s Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, said “born-alive” laws are trying to regulate something that doesn’t happen.

- Kimport, whose research involved interviewing 30 people in 2018 who had abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, and 10 more from 2021 to 2022, also criticized Sheehy’s use of “elective abortion.” In her view, that terminology reflects a political colloquialism that’s come to mean an abortion that is optional. That’s different from the medical definition, she said, in which an elective procedure is one that may be necessary but is not an emergency and can be scheduled for a particular date, such as knee surgery. 

- Kimport said Sheehy’s statement “reveals a blatant misunderstanding of pregnancy care.”

- Sheehy’s description of Tester’s “extreme” position that would allow abortion “up until the moment of birth” simply doesn’t hold up.

- These statements are rooted in Tester’s support for the Women’s Health Protection Act. That bill, however, doesn’t open the door to abortion on demand later in pregnancy. Instead, it allows for the role of medical judgment. In addition, CDC data indicates that late-term pregnancies are rare. Also, the term “elective abortion” is a political rather than medical phrasing. 

- We rate this claim False.