Trump Lawyer Jay Sekulow Lies About California Abortion Bill to Collect Emails for Financial Donations

The false claims have been posted and reshared thousands of times on Twitter with language such as, “California introduces bill to legalize infanticide before and after birth”; “Killing babies up to 28 days old!”; and “An abortion bill that will essentially legalize a form of infanticide.” (When asked for a response to the tweets, Twitter said the posts were “not found to be in violation of the Twitter Rules,” adding that “our misinformation policies apply to COVID-19, civic integrity and synthetic and manipulated media.”)

The bill, which you can read here, removes the requirement that a coroner has to investigate “deaths related to or following known or suspected self-induced or criminal abortion.” The bill prohibits using a coroner’s statements on the certificate of fetal death “to establish, bring, or support a criminal prosecution or civil cause of damages against any person.”

“Basically the whole point is we want to make sure that if you do experience a miscarriage, if you experience a stillbirth, if you experience a self-induced abortion, you have a self-induced abortion, that you are not criminally prosecuted for that,” said Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, the Democrat representing the East Bay and one of the bill’s sponsors. But it still allows authorities “to be able to investigate the facts of a newborn child’s death, including whether the child was born living and when and how the child died.”