Posted on May 19,
2024
Extremities
Are Democrats for tearing babies' legs off?
by
Daniel
Clark
At long last, a pro-abortion politician has been put
on the spot. It wasn't a Democrat, of
course, but what if prominent members of that party were given the same
treatment? Ever since the Dobbs
ruling, the media have delighted in portraying anti-abortion Republicans as the
extremists on the issue, by demanding that they respond to baseless
hypotheticals and dishonest anecdotes, asking them to condemn remarks that each
other has made, and searching for secondary wedge issues to sow disunity among
them. Meanwhile, the real extremists on
the other side are rarely compelled to reveal themselves.
In
an interview with former ESPN broadcaster Sage Steele, independent presidential
candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. admitted that he is in favor of abortion being
legal "even if it's full-term." Leading
up to that remark, he had tried to rhetorically soften the blow, by saying
"every abortion is a tragedy" and that he wants there to be fewer of them, but
in the end he could not find a single circumstance under which he would say the
practice should be illegal. His running
mate, Nicole Shanahan, later expressed surprise at this answer, and insisted
that the two of them had discussed it and this was not his true position. In a clumsy attempt at damage control, he
responded with a social media post, saying "abortion should be legal up to a
certain number of weeks, and restricted thereafter." Shanahan later chimed in to say this limit
would be somewhere between 15-18 weeks.
It's not as if this was a hostile interview. Steele simply asked an important question,
and being unsatisfied with unsatisfactory responses, she repeatedly followed
up. Yet, because of this innocent
exercise in journalism, a man who wants to take on the greatest responsibility
in the world has revealed that he is not even the primary source of his own
opinion about a major issue.
President Biden is never challenged this same way, mostly
because he would never consent to an interview with anybody outside the reliably
liberal media. Instead, he is allowed to
get away with the equivalent of giving name, rank and serial number, by saying
"I'm for Roe v. Wade," "I support Roe v. Wade," "I think Roe
got it right," etc. What he thinks the
logically impaired and often self-contradictory 1973 ruling actually means, he
won't say.
For example, the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey
decision purported to uphold Roe v. Wade, while at the same time
allowing state restrictions that had not been permitted for the previous
nineteen years. All of a sudden,
Pennsylvania's law requiring parental consent, spousal notification and a
24-hour waiting period was legal, and yet Roe was still in force. So which Roe is it that Joe Biden
thinks got it right, the original Roe, or its post-Casey
incarnation? Does he believe, for
example, that minors must be able to have abortions without parental
consent? He has never had to answer.
In the majority opinion in Roe, Justice Harry
Blackmun absurdly wrote that it was not necessary for the Supreme Court to
determine when a new human life begins, even while declaring its killing to be a "fundamental constitutional right." Nevertheless, he wrote that if a human fetus
is ever found to be a person, then it has a Fourteenth Amendment right to
life. In other words, the ruling invited
its own overturning, in such a way that would make abortion uniformly illegal
nationwide. Biden should be asked to
reconcile these two incongruous conclusions.
Should the Court have legalized the killing of creatures it conceded might
be people? Furthermore, because Roe
made no judgment about when a new life begins, Biden's answer to that question
cannot be "I support Roe." And if
it is really unknown whether we are depriving over a million people a year of
their constitutional right to life, shouldn't our government immediately and
completely dedicate itself to answering that question?
Out
of a sense of responsibility to the American people, an unbiased, uncorrupted
reporter should at a minimum be willing to say to the president, "Not everybody
understands what supporting Roe v. Wade means from a policy
standpoint. Please enlighten us." Even if, like someone using a word to define
itself, he said that supporting Roe v. Wade means he supports Roe v.
Wade, such a weak evasion would itself be telling.
Anticipating the Dobbs decision overturning Roe,
House Democrats twice passed the ghoulishly euphemistic Women's Health
Protection Act, only to be thwarted by a narrow margin in the Senate. This bill, which was pitched as an attempt to
codify Roe into law, would have legalized abortion at any time for any
reason, all the way through nine months.
It did draw a distinction without a difference between pre- and post-viability
abortions, in that pre-viability abortions would be unconditionally legal,
whereas a post-viability abortion would only be allowed if the abortionist felt
it was necessary. President Biden did
not have an opportunity to sign this legislation, but he did endorse it. How hard would it be for a reporter to ask
him if, by saying he supports Roe v. Wade, he means he stands by the
pro-abortion absolutist position of the Women's Health Protection Act?
If he answered yes, then he could be asked if he is
aware that this bill would have prohibited any restriction on the distribution
of abortion drugs like mifepristone by mail.
This means a continuation of the practice of prescribing them through telemedicine,
without an in-person examination, and therefore without regard to the age of the
fetus or the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy. Is that any way to protect women's health,
Mr. President? When mifepristone was
approved by the FDA, this was done without adequate testing because President
Bill Clinton fast-tracked the approval process, by categorizing pregnancy as a "life-threatening
illness." Does President Biden agree
that pregnancy is a life-threatening illness, and if not, does he believe
mifepristone was wrongly approved?
Democrats often tell us that abortion is an issue that
should be decided "between a woman and her doctor," by which they falsely
suggest that abortions are routinely done for legitimate medical purposes. Doesn't the Women's Health Protection Act
let the cat out of the bag, that when they say "doctor" they merely mean an abortionist,
and not a practitioner of the healing arts?
Moreover, when they say they "trust women" to make that decision, what
are they trusting them with, if abortion is a matter of no moral
significance, but merely a "choice," like coffee, tea or milk?
One
might have thought Vice President Kamala Harris' "historic" campaign photo-op
at a Planned Parenthood clinic was an obvious opportunity for a few questions
that were begging to be asked. For starters,
how much of the clinic she had seen beyond the lobby? Did they show her what actually goes on
there, and would she care to describe it for us? Did she visit the "products of conception
room," where the body parts from suction abortions are reassembled to make sure
nothing was left behind in the womb?
Is Harris aware of Planned Parenthood's racist origins
during the eugenics movement of the early 20th Century? Would founder Margaret Sanger not have
considered her, America's first black vice president, to be a "human weed"?
Is she aware that Planned Parenthood harvests and
sells organs from aborted fetuses? If
so, how can it be possible to procure human hearts, lungs, brains and eyes from
non-people? When Dr. Mary Gatter, who
was medical director of PP in Los Angeles, suggested "using a less
crunchy technique to get more whole specimens," what might she have meant by
that? In the vice president's opinion,
is it preferable for abortions to be less crunchy, or more so?
In a video recently made public during congressional
hearings, Dr. Ann Schutt-Aine, chief medical officer of PP Gulf Coast, suggests
that it is possible to circumvent the ban on partial-birth abortion by tearing
off the legs of the fetus before pulling the trunk of the body through the
birth canal. Do President Biden and Vice
President Harris think this ought to be permissible? What about all the Democrat candidates across
America who run ads bragging about receiving endorsements from Planned
Parenthood? Are those endorsements
mutual, meaning that they approve of all the gruesome practices that PP
employees discuss so casually? And how
does one tear the legs off a nonentity, anyway?
Not only don't the liberal media want Democrats to
have to answer these questions; they don't want their viewers and readers to dwell
on them, either. As much as the issue of
abortion has dominated the news over the past two years, there has been next to
no discussion of what one actually is. Perfectly
accurate pictures and descriptions of it are considered outrageous and
inflammatory, because the thing itself must be reduced to an abstraction in
order to be made acceptable.
The total absence of any natural journalistic
curiosity when it comes to this issue illustrates pro-abortion activism to be
the mother of all media biases, so to speak.
If Democrats were simply asked to explain where they stand, the way Sage
Steele asked RFK Jr., each of them would ultimately have two choices. Either draw a line somewhere, or else condone
abortion in every case, even if it means tearing the legs off a fully formed
child in order to kill it and take its organs.
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