Kamala Harris supports “killing babies”, Pope Francis has said, as he called for American Catholics to vote for the candidate they think is the “lesser evil” in this year’s election.
The 87-year old church leader criticised both Ms Harris and Donald Trump on Friday, telling reporters travelling on his plane that he disagreed with their stances on abortion and immigration, respectively.
“Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants or the one who [supports] killing babies,” he said. “Both are against life.”
On Ms Harris’s abortion policy, which would reinstate federal protections for pregnancy terminations with legislation, he said: “To have an abortion is to kill a human being. You may like the word or not, but it’s killing”.
On Trump’s immigration policy, he said shutting US borders to foreigners was a “grave sin”.
Trump has pledged to deport one million migrants if he wins office on November 5, and to toughen up the policing of the southern border by deploying the military.
Addressing the choice available to voters, the pope said on Friday: “One should vote, and choose the lesser evil.”
“Who is the lesser evil, the woman or man? I don’t know. Everyone in their conscience should think and do it.”
The pope, who was speaking to reporters on the way back to the Vatican after a tour of Asian countries, has previously intervened in US elections to criticise Trump.
In 2016, he said that the Republican nominee’s policy of building a wall on the southern US border was “not Christian”.
Data from the Pew Research Centre suggests there are 52 million Catholic adults in the United States, which is around a fifth of the adult population.
Joe Biden, the outgoing president, is the second Catholic to have held the office, after John F Kennedy.