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Environmentalists Worry Trump’s EPA Pick Will Harm Unborn Children

Since when did the left, particularly climate change alarmists, start caring about the health of unborn babies?

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A lefty environmental group is claiming that Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency pick will endanger the lives of unborn children.

The Environmental Defense Fund has shelled out more than $100,000 on an ad attacking Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt on TV stations in Washington DC and six other states, in an effort to stop the Senate from confirming him as the new EPA administrator.

There are a number of issues with the ad, namely that claims it makes are patently false. I’ll get into the factual errors in a second, but first, let’s get to the obvious: since when did the Left, particularly climate change alarmists, start caring about the health of unborn children?

For years abortion advocates and environmentalists have worked side by side because the rhetoric of climate change alarmism and reducing the number of human births go hand in hand. In August, abortion provider Planned Parenthood joined forces with billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer to fight Trump, because their messaging compliments one another.

The nation’s largest abortion provider still fights for environmental causes, which would probably make their founder, known eugenicist Margaret Sanger, proud. She directly attributed many world ills to “overbreeding among the working class.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a patron saint in the eyes of abortion advocates, made a similar remark in 2014 when she said Roe v. Wade was really about reducing the number of births among poor and undesirable population groups. This kind of thinking isn’t unique among leftists, who see abortion as a means to limit human activity, thus improving the planet, which, to environmentalists, is the highest good.

That brings us to this ad, which has radically different views about harming fetuses than one would expect from an environmental group. In the video, the female narrator tells us the brains of “developing children are disproportionately affected by mercury exposure.”

As she speaks, she is talking over the sound of a baby’s heat beat, which presumably belongs to the unborn infant whose sonogram image can be seen throughout the video. The message is clear: a fetus is a developing child, whose life ought to be protected by keeping him or her away from mercury.

The narrator goes on to say that Pruitt “actually questions whether mercury poses public health hazards.”

“We can’t trust Pruitt with our kids’ health,” the ad concludes. “Ask the Senate to vote ‘no’ on Pruitt.”

Now here’s where things get fun. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s William Yeatman explains the citation for this claim comes from a brief penned by more than 20 attorneys general to the U.S. Court of Appeals explaining to the court that a series of EPA regulations wouldn’t help anyone’s health and that its $10 billion price tag was too much.

“Pruitt wasn’t questioning mercury’s effect on human health,” Yeatman writes. “Rather, he was objecting to EPA’s mercury rule, which he argued had no impact on human health.”

So the ad’s claims — that Pruitt is fine with exposing unborn babies to dangerous levels of mercury — are misleading at best. Tall tales aren’t a new tactic from liberals, but caring about the life of an unborn child and being comfortable with a sonogram image is uncharted territory.

It’s interesting to watch the Left, especially the hand-wringing, granola-eating types, turn on itself and admit that unborn lives are precious and need to be protected. What’s more, this advertisement espouses a very conservative view of environmental regulations — that pollutants ought to be regulated to the extent that they harm human lives.