Most Americans are worried these days about inflation, their life savings, crime, open borders and education. But for some, the issue of abortion looms large.
“Hysteria” is the only word that accurately describes what some champions of abortion are saying. Why the sky hasn’t fallen is a mystery. Here are some examples.
During a conference this fall, Vice President Kamala Harris opened her remarks at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles by noting “when I’m traveling around the country, one of the feelings that I hear most is fear. It’s fear.” She later said, “there’s a lot of fear.”
The fear she was talking about was not the fear of being killed, raped or mugged. Nor was it the fear of families not being able to pay their bills. It was the fear that in some places elected officials have placed restrictions on abortion.
Around the same time, President Biden held a political rally on abortion saying, “Patients are being denied prescriptions that they’ve been taking for years for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, you know, because pharmacies are concerned that those drugs could also be used to terminate a pregnancy so they’re not giving them their prescriptions.”
No evidence was given.
After the overturning of Roe v. Wade Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “People will die because of this decision.”
She was not referring to children being killed by abortion but to some hypothetical case involving what she calls pregnant “menstruating people.”
A television ad launched by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quoted a doctor saying he thought the days of “back-alley abortions” were over. “Too often, women died. I thought those days were long behind us.”
Fact Check: According to the CDC, the number of women who died of an illegal abortion in 1972 (the year before Roe) was not some astronomical figure, as pro-abortion activists have alleged. The number was 39.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that “MAGA” Republicans have “pledged to ban abortion in all 50 states and sentence doctors for 5 years in prison.” Similarly, Kamala Harris is on record saying their goal is to criminalize doctors and nurses “with up to five years in prison.”
This is patently untrue. The fact of the matter is that some pro-life Republicans have said that healthcare providers who intentionally allow a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion could serve up to 5 years in prison if they failed to attend to the child. The issue is infanticide, not abortion, which apparently makes no difference to these women.
Rep. Eric Swalwell ran a TV ad showing cops with guns drawn showing up at a house handcuffing a woman in front of her screaming husband and children because she had an unlawful abortion.
This is simply not true. The only people who are being subjected to SWAT Teams showing up at their homes with guns drawn are pro-life activists.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams charged in August that her opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, wants to “investigate and punish women for having miscarriages.” PolitiFact, hardly a right-wing source, said her accusation was completely false. She lost to Kemp in the midterm elections.
One of the most demagogic attempts to drum up hysteria about abortion rights being lost was done by National Public Radio (NPR). In November, before the voters went to the polls, it aired an audio of a woman undergoing an abortion. It was a graphic depiction that recorded her crying and moaning with the sound of the suction abortion in the background. NPR is paid for by the taxpayers.
Does the hysteria work? With some it does. Those who are already strong abortion-rights advocates are the most likely to go into orbit. Alarmists know this, which is why they make incendiary statements and concoct morbid audios of an abortion.
The midterm elections did not go well for the pro-life side, perhaps because these fever pitches proved attractive. All five states which had abortion on the ballot chose to side with the pro-abortion camp.
It must be acknowledged the pro-life initiatives which sought to ban abortion in virtually every instance proved to be too extreme. Most Americans are against abortion for any reason, and at any time of gestation, but they are also against proposals that don’t leave the door open in some extreme cases.
Pro-life Americans did have something to brag about with the defeat of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney from the Hudson Valley area of New York. As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the Party, he was one of the most vocal supporters of abortion-on-demand anywhere in the nation. He lost to Republican Michael Lawler, shocking most analysts.
Science and ethics are on the pro-life side, so there is reason for optimism. But it is not easy to combat hysteria. It is a sign of desperation that so many prominent pro-abortion politicians are distorting, and indeed lying, about abortion, just to get votes. Their tactics are reflective of their ethics, or lack thereof.
