Perhaps the most bizarre claim you might hear Republicans make is that the Democrats, in some states, have passed laws permitting infanticide. I don’t need to tell you this is not true because there’s no conceivable rationale for it. Nevertheless, you will hear this claim, including from Donald Trump who just made the accusation again during a Fox News interview on Wednesday: “Hard to believe, the [Democrats] have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth. It’s crazy.”

Thanks to Daniel Dale, CNN’s in-house fact-checker, Daniel Dale, we can at least identify an origin story for the claim.

Similar false claims have circulated about California. Some of those claims were based on criticism of vague language in an early version of a Democratic state legislator’s 2022 bill that was intended to protect people from being prosecuted over miscarriages, stillbirths and self-managed abortions.

But the vague language was revised before the bill was signed into law.

Months before passage, a Democratic-led legislative committee acknowledged that the early text’s vague use of the phrase “perinatal death” might have inadvertently left open the interpretation that the bill would immunize people from punishment in all cases in which their baby died in the first days of its life, even in cases where the death was caused by acts after the baby was born. The final bill that was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom clarified that the “perinatal death” immunity is specifically for “perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero.”

In other words, there is no basis for a claim that California passed a law legalizing post-birth executions.

There’s only one reason why a lawmaker would want to pass a law protecting women from being prosecuted for losing their baby to miscarriage, stillbirth, or .“perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero.” And that reason is that the Republicans are passing laws that make any non-live birth presumptively criminal. This includes cases where abortion is used to address a medical risk associated with fetal death, severe fetal abnormality, or other major health risks to the woman carrying the pregnancy.

Any couple that has experienced a lost pregnancy knows all too intimately how painful it is, and it’s unimaginable that people in that situation should be treated as criminal suspects who have to answer to investigators. Removing the possibility of prosecution only partially mitigates against this problem because it doesn’t eliminate a potential investigation even if it provides an absolute defense.

The California law was intended to deal with this monumental assholery, and not to prove the point, the Republican presidential nominee is accusing the Democrats of promoting infanticide.

Nice.