Were Fox News anchor Shannon Bream’s abortion “questions” for Tim Walz scripted by the Trump campaign? They might as well have been.

Shannon Bream is not normally much of a MAGA propagandist, at least not by Fox News standards. But I guess when she’s interviewing the Democratic vice presidential candidate currently beating Fox’s (presumably) favorite felonious p***y grabber, her bosses have her pull out all the stops.

Bream is however, anti-abortion. She did her darnedest to falsely paint Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as an abortion extremist and to legitimize the phony fig leaf of “life of the mother” abortion-ban exceptions. Worse, she trotted out the old “infanticide” lie that Fox loves to push.

Bream ignored the Harris/Walz campaign stance on abortion in favor of bogus gotchas to Walz

Bream (a lawyer) either lied about Minnesota’s abortion law or else didn’t bother to read it for herself. Notice that she didn't ask Walz flatly to discuss his position on abortion but immediately tried to paint him into an unfavorable box:

BREAM: I want to talk about abortion too, because this came up at the debate. It's been a winning argument for Democrats on many ballots. But I want to clarify what the law is. There in Minnesota, Abortion Finder, a website that helps women find access, says abortion is legal throughout pregnancy. In Minnesota, there is no ban or limit on abortion in Minnesota based on how far along in a pregnancy you are, you signed the bill that makes it legal through all nine months. Is that a position you think Democrats should advocate for nationally?

Walz replied that the campaign’s position is the restoration of Roe v. Wade – i.e. not to nationalize Minnesota’s law.

It speaks volumes that Bream didn’t seem to care about the Harris/Walz campaign’s position on abortion. Her obvious intent was to tarnish Walz.

BREAM: What you signed is, there's not a single limit through nine months of pregnancy. Roe had a trimester framework that did have limits through the pregnancy. The Minnesota law does not have that.

Walz replied that the Minnesota law “puts the decision with the woman and her health care providers.” He added, “The situation we have is when you don't have the ability of health care providers to provide that, that's where you end up with a situation like Amanda Zurawski in Texas, where they are afraid to do what's necessary. This doesn't change anything. It puts the decision back on to the woman, to the physicians.”

Let’s be clear about who Amanda Zurawski is. She's a Texas woman who had to wait until she nearly died to get a medical procedure to remove her non-viable fetus because she was not close enough to death’s door when the condition was discovered.

Walz correctly pointed out that Donald Trump has been “asking for a nationwide abortion ban.”

Bream interrupted to say that Trump has “said repeatedly that he will not sign a national abortion ban. Are you calling that just, it’s a flat-out lie?”

Yes, Walz was saying that. And rightly so. Trump has recently said he will not sign a national abortion ban, after refusing to commit. Surely Bream knows that. And if she doesn’t know that Trump and running mate J.D. Vance plan an abortion ban – and just call it “a national minimum standard,” she ought to give up her GOP TV gig right now.

Walz also correctly pointed out that Vance has previously said he supports an abortion ban. “We see it as a right of women to make their own bodily decisions, and that's what the states, like my state, have the ability to put that in,” Walz said. “States like Georgia force women to cross the border, and then we have a death of Amber Thurman. So, let's be very clear, trying to cut hairs on an issue on this is not where the American public's at. They want the restoration of Roe versus Wade. Vice President Harris said she would sign it. That's what we'll do if elected.”

Bream still didn’t care about what a Harris administration would do. She went back to trying to demonize Walz based on the Minnesota law. While she was at it, Bream dismissed Thurman’s death as hospital error.

“To be clear, the Minnesota law is far beyond Roe v. Wade,” Bream said. She said that according to Thurman’s family, the woman died from “complications from an abortion pill that she received and she didn't get proper care when she went to a Georgia hospital, which had multiple opportunities to intervene there. Her own attorney, the family's attorney, says it wasn't the Georgia law, it was the hospital’s, what he claims is malpractice, not treating her when she clearly showed up in distress and still had the byproducts of her pregnancy because of that rare complication from the abortion pill. So just to be clear on the Georgia law and how her family and her attorney sees it.”

Not really.

FACT CHECK: After Walz brought up Thurman’s death in last week’s debate, they thanked him and called her death “a direct result of Georgia’s archaic and dangerously restrictive abortion laws, which denied her the life-saving care she so desperately needed.” And while the Georgia hospital may be at fault, ProPublica reported that experts say extreme abortion bans “pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing ‘irreversible’ harm when they intervened” with the kind of procedure Thurman needed. Furthermore, “since abortion was banned or restricted in 22 states over the past two years, women in serious danger have been turned away from emergency rooms and told that they needed to be in more peril before doctors could help. Some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives. Those whose pregnancies weren’t even viable have been told they could return when they were 'crashing.'”

Maternal deaths have skyrocketed and infant death rates have spiked since Texas’ abortion ban.

Thurman’s is the kind of situation “you're going to get into when you take this decision and put it the hands of politicians like Donald Trump, rather than women and their doctors,” Walz said.

Again, Bream didn’t care about the campaign’s position. Now, she pulled out the infanticide lie, though she didn’t call it that.

BREAM: Let's clarify more changes that you signed in Minnesota as well. Several things were repealed with respect to reporting infants who may have survived an abortion attempt. Language that used to be part of the statute was taken out. We'll put this on the screen so people can see. It used to require medical personnel to, quote, preserve the life and health of the “born alive” infant. That language has been repealed. It's no longer part of the law. Also struck from the law was language about reporting infants that are born alive, what treatment they receive and whether they live or die. Why was it important to you to get that protection out of the law?

As I noted above, this is an old Republican smear. But don’t take it from me. Take it from PBS’ fact check when J.D. Vance tried it at last week’s debate:

Experts said cases in which a baby is born following an attempted abortion are rare. Less than 1 percent of abortions nationwide occur in the third trimester. And infanticide, the crime of killing a child within a year of its birth, is illegal in all U.S. states.

In May 2023, Walz, as Minnesota governor, signed legislation updating a state law for “infants who are born alive.” It said babies are “fully recognized” as human people and therefore, protected under state law. The change did not alter regulations that already require doctors to provide patients with appropriate care.

I wish Walz had called out Bream’s underhanded tactics here. Instead, he gave a bureaucratese-type response that “Minnesota law aligns with every other case of what positions are required by their ethical responsibilities. And so it changed nothing other than aligning with all care that physicians provide in any circumstance for any medical case.”

That allowed Bream to come back with yet another infanticide suggestion: “But you do acknowledge it takes out the language about preserving the life of an infant who was born alive.”

Walz finally had enough. He came up with what I think was the right response:

WALZ: This is a distraction from the real issue here is, is women being forced into miscarriages, women being forced to go back home, get sepsis, potentially die, like we saw in cases in Texas. And maternal mortality rates in Texas have skyrocketed off the charts because of this.

This is bad policy. Vice president and I have been very clear on this. We will restore the rights of Roe versus Wade. We will make sure women have their health care decisions. We will not put people's lives at risk because of the geography of where they live. And it will go back to the way it was before Donald Trump gleefully said, “we've got the best of both worlds here, things are wonderful. The states are handling it, it's a beautiful thing.”

It's not a beautiful thing to see women dying. It's not a beautiful thing to put doctors at risk of being imprisoned.

Bream finally backed off. But not before she got in one more dishonest talking point. She agreed it’s terrible “to see any single woman suffer.” But then, ignoring the real-world effects of abortion bans that we’ve already seen, i.e. that exceptions are little more than window dressing, Bream said, “There’s not a single state, no matter how pro-life or restricted their laws are that do not allow a doctor to intercede. That's true in Georgia and Texas as well.”

Bream moved on. But later, she went after Walz’s inconsequential misstatements while ignoring Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s dangerous lies.

I actually like Shannon Bream, at least somewhat. But she disgraced herself in this interview, in my opinion.

You can see why I say that below, from the October 6, 2024 Fox News Sunday.