While wrapping up a recent segment with an Iowa pro-life advocate, CNN’s Dana Bash let her audience know that despite her guest’s contentions, she had never “talked to a Democrat who wants abortion-on-demand until time of birth.”
Just because Democrats haven’t talked to Bash about personally driving pregnant women down to Maryland’s all-trimester abortion clinic or Warren Hern’s busy Boulder shop — where he admits to performing late-term abortions on perfectly healthy women and fetuses — those places still exist. And they exist because Democrats, including the president, support legal abortion for any reason until the moment of birth.
Numerous states have passed laws that effectively allow unfettered late-term abortions. States like Colorado boast that these policies create “social, moral, and economic benefits.” Washington Democrats have also attempted on numerous occasions to “codify” such policy nationally. The Women’s Health Protection Act, for instance, would have made abortion legal over the first two trimesters and then allowed for the termination of a pregnancy when a healthcare provider (who doesn’t have to be a doctor) determines that a woman’s life is threatened (which no one opposes) or if they detect any mental distress (which can mean anything.) Only one Democrat voted against it.
Of course, rather than repeating what Democrats talk about, Bash could simply ask them to list specific legal limitations they support. I’ve yet to hear one. Every time “pro-choice” politician is challenged to provide a limit (which is rarely), they offer the same tedious answer about how ending a life is solely the purview of a woman and her “doctor.”
NBC reporter Dasha Burns played the same dishonest game with Ron DeSantis recently, calling the governor’s claim that Democrats support abortion without limits a “misrepresentation,” noting that “there’s no indication of Democrats pushing for that.” She is objectively wrong on that count. But let’s not ignore the first part of her statement, in which she says “1.3 percent of abortions happen at 21 weeks or higher.”
Just imagine a reporter dismissing the victims of school shootings as a rounding error because the victims only represent .00001 of firearm fatalities. Those 1.3 percent of abortions, by the way, result in the termination of something like 8,000-10,000 viable unborn children’s lives — or around 8,000-10,000 more than die from the dangerous “extreme weather” the media keep scaremongering about.
For years, media and “fact-checkers” have sworn that no Democrat has ever supported a third-trimester abortion but also that third-trimester abortions are “extremely rare.” Experts, they report, promise that late-term abortions typically occur because of “fetal abnormalities.”
Plenty of evidence suggests that women get late-term abortions for the same reasons they get early abortions: birth control. The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute found that both medical literature and late-term abortion providers show most late-term procedures are not performed for “maternal health complications or lethal fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancy.” That finding corresponds with a pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute study contending most women who seek late-term abortions “are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”
More than that, if these hand-picked experts and Democrats truly believed third-trimester abortions were “extremely rare” and only existed to mitigate genuine health risks, they wouldn’t oppose regulations to ensure the protection of both mothers and unborn children. As it stands, however, Democrats not only oppose any and all post-viable limitations on abortions, they oppose compelling doctors to provide infants who survive attempted abortions the care provided any other human being. Again, it’s almost certainly true that Bernie Sanders isn’t “talking” to Bash about denying unwanted newborns any legal protection; he simply votes to make sure they are denied it.
The point of all this is to create the impression that support for trimester abortion exists only in the paranoiac imagination of pro-life extremists. Recall, however, that it was only a couple of weeks ago the entire media was up in arms over the story of an 18-year-old Nebraska woman who was sentenced to 90 days in jail after killing her unborn baby at 30 weeks. Even though she wasn’t convicted on an abortion charge, the incident was meant to illustrate the consequences of pro-life fanaticism.
What it illustrated to me is that the political left doesn’t believe terminating the life of a healthy viable fetus and then burning the body and throwing the remains into a pit should be punished. Because it doesn’t believe in any limits.
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