Let us proceed to the crux of the matter. The Democratic Party (a) supports abortion until the baby is born (and is, at best, agnostic on passive infanticide) but (b) recognizes that this is a non-starter with the 99% of the population that is not in Congress. Consequently, (c) they must devise creative—or, at the very least, evasive—responses that are, at best, misleading and, at worst, untrue.
In comparison, the verbal gymnastics employed by the Democrats are of a caliber that would shame Simone Biles, who executed a double-twisting double somersault from the balance beam. There is no doubt that the Democrats support unrestricted abortion until birth.
It is perplexing how they evade accountability. It is beneficial that reporters do not hold them to account, as they maintain that since no one is that barbaric, the real perpetrators are Republicans and/or pro-lifers who are fabricating these allegations.
Following the Republican presidential debate last week, Jen Psaki, formerly of Biden’s White House staff and now at MSNBC, tweeted, “No one supports abortion until birth.”
TikTok star Harry Sisson was indignant, stating, “Democrats do not support abortion up until the day of birth. Every single Republican candidate on the debate stage is lying to the American people right now. This is disgraceful.” National Review Online’s Brittany Bernstein attempted to debunk some of the falsehoods. She wrote,
“But of course, none of these claims square with the facts. The 2020 Democratic Party platform explicitly affirms a universal right to abortion and doesn’t reference a single abortion limitation acceptable to the party. ‘We believe unequivocally . . . that every woman should be able to access high-quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion,’ the platform states.”
Bernstein went on to add
“It also promises to ‘fight to overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights’ — in other words, to block any and all limits on abortion, including gestational-age limits. The platform embraces federal funding for abortion businesses, supports repealing the Hyde amendment that precludes taxpayer dollars from directly reimbursing abortion providers, and promises to ‘protect and codify the right to reproductive freedom.’”
This is merely the beginning.
The question of the defense must also be addressed. We may also consider the perspective of a Washington Post columnist who offers a balanced and reasoned analysis of the evidence, ultimately concluding that the claims are not substantiated.
Philip Bump refers to it as “a favorite bit of hyperbole,” and states that it is “misleading, if not…flatly incorrect.” One might inquire as to the veracity of this assertion. How is the assertion that Democrats support abortion up to the moment of birth “misleading, if not…flatly incorrect”?
It is noteworthy that Bump concedes a point that is virtually never acknowledged by pro-abortionists: “There are states in which there are no limits on the point of a pregnancy when abortion is available.” This is a remarkable assertion.
One might inquire as to how one might extricate oneself from this quandary. The use of ridicule and the selective use of sources.
T]hat doesn’t mean that a woman can simply walk into a facility at her 40th week and request an abortion. Instead, as PolitiFact wrote when considering this question last year, such procedures “are performed on a case-by-case basis when there are maternal or fetal complications.”
Moreover, these abortions are as rare as hen’s teeth:
.Importantly, even abortions performed after 20 weeks are rare.
Two points in rebuttal in reverse order. “Rare” is in the eye of the beholder, or, in this case, in the blind eye of the beholder.
Cassy Fiano-Chesser explains how un-rare these abortions are:
According to the CDC’s 2019 Abortion Surveillance Report, the most recent year for which data is available, 1.1% of all abortions were committed after 21 weeks of pregnancy. If you include the second trimester, or after 14 weeks of pregnancy, the number rises to 8% of all abortions.
While 1.1% or even 8% might seem like small numbers, they aren’t. The CDC reports 398,505 abortions committed in 2019. 1.1% of that number equals 4,383 abortions committed after 21 weeks of pregnancy; 8% equals 31,880. Of course, states are not required to report their data to the CDC — and numerous states, like California and Maryland, do not. Others, like New Jersey, did not have reporting requirements in place, causing the CDC warn that its data may not be accurate. Essentially, this means the true number of abortions — regardless of gestational age — is almost certainly higher. Using the Guttmacher Institute’s numbers (which are collected directly from abortion providers), 930,160 abortions were committed in 2020. If the CDC’s percentages hold true with 1.1% of abortions occurring after 21 weeks, that equates to an estimate of more than 10,000 human lives per year, and 8% occurring after 14 weeks equates to an estimate of more than 74,000 human lives per year.
I would like to address a further point in response to the argument that these procedures are carried out on a case-by-case basis in the event of maternal or fetal complications. Once more, they are not implying, but rather stating as a fact that these abortions are rare and almost always due to the unborn child being severely injured.
In a further contribution to the debate, Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glen Kessler noted that the majority of cases where the unborn child has “some serious, catastrophic fetal abnormality” are associated with severe medical conditions, such as pregnancy-related high blood pressure, severe hypertension or multiple sclerosis. He therefore concluded that an abortion would reduce the woman’s risk of death.
The source of this information is Warren Hern, the proprietor of an abortion clinic in Colorado that specializes in late abortions. This information was provided in a story published in the Washington Post by Kessler last year.
Since that time, The Atlantic has published a profile of Hern written by Elaine Godfrey, which was headlined “The Abortion Absolutist.” This profile paints a very different picture of Hern than the one presented in the Washington Examiner.
- Hern admitted that at least half of the late-term abortions he’s performed over the past half-century were elective, meaning that there was no underlying medical condition in the baby or the mother. Abortion advocates regularly assure the public that late-term abortions of this sort are exceedingly rare, if existent at all. But here we have it from the horse’s mouth. Who knows how many thousands of these abortions Hern has performed? Again, he’s been doing this for half a century.
The situation becomes increasingly untenable. Those who are able to tolerate the content may access the article here.
The defenses for abortion on demand up until birth are, in and of themselves, inadequate in the rare instances where pro-abortionists concede their existence. However, for Democrats and their seemingly limitless supply of obliging reporters, attempting to shift the onus to pro-lifers serves as a stark reminder of the challenges that they face.
Chelsea Garcia is a political writer with a special interest in international relations and social issues. Events surrounding the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel are a major focus for political journalists. But as a former local reporter, she is also interested in national politics.
Chelsea Garcia studied media, communication and political science in Texas, USA, and learned the journalistic trade during an internship at a daily newspaper. In addition to her political writing, she is pursuing a master's degree in multimedia and writing at Texas.
