Last week, due to Sen. Rand Paul’s prompting, national media asked Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Shultz whether she believed aborting full-term, seven-pound babies should be legal. Her response—that an abortion on a full-term child was the mother’s constitutional right—is clearly extreme and deserves the revulsion it has met.
Quite obviously, the Democratic Party is no longer about abortion being “safe, legal, and rare,” as the Clinton-era party platform claimed. The party is now unabashed in its support for abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
But as extreme as this position is, it is by no means the party’s most extreme with regard to abortion. Here are five positions of the party and many of its leaders (even if not necessarily all those who continue to vote for Democrats) that are arguably even more extreme.
1. Democrats Support Aborting Babies for Race, Sex, and Down Syndrome
Democrats have strongly opposed state and federal bills prohibiting abortions sought because of the unborn child’s race or sex. When the U.S. House of Representatives considered the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act in 2012, which would have prohibited abortions because of the father’s race or the unborn child’s sex, Democrats opposed the bill by a vote of 161-20. A party that describes itself as a champion of women and minorities is willing to sacrifice those principles for abortion.
Likewise, when a similar bill became law in Arizona, it did so with only two Democratic votes (22 against) in the entire Arizona legislature. The law now faces an ongoing lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union. Similarly, a North Dakota bill prohibiting abortion because of Down Syndrome passed against Democratic objection.
Democrats do not just support aborting seven-pound babies. They apparently support aborting seven-pound babies even when they are targeted because they are girls, their father was black, or they might have a disability.
2. Democrats Oppose Offering Women Other Alternatives
Everyone should be able to agree that women should be aware of their options before having an abortion. Unfortunately, Democrats all too often don’t seem to share that view.
In recent years, Democrats, at the behest of abortion advocacy groups, have gone on the offensive against nonprofit organizations that provide women with information about abortion alternatives and offer them practical support (diapers, parenting classes, help enrolling in public-assistance programs, etc.) so they can choose to keep their baby. Most recently, in California, Democrats have proposed an unconstitutional bill to force these pro-life pregnancy centers to refer women for abortions.The Clinton administration regulations on Title X (pregnancy “options counseling”) require government-funded counselors at Planned Parenthood to tell women about abortion, but adoption counseling is optional. Taxpayer-paid “options” counselors at Planned Parenthood can satisfy their obligation to fully inform a woman in a crisis pregnancy about her options by telling her about abortion and keeping the baby without saying a word about adoption.
In effect, the Clinton administration regulations, coupled with using abortionists as Title X providers, have created an adoption gag rule. Perhaps this is why Planned Parenthood can claim only a handful of adoption referrals every year while performing roughly 330,000 abortions at almost $500 each every year.
Maybe that revenue stream for one of the biggest electoral boosters of the Democratic Party is why the Clinton Title X regulations don’t require them to talk to women about adoption. As former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson has explained, adoption referrals are disfavored because they aren’t “revenue generating.”
Democrats don’t just support aborting seven-pound babies. They regularly oppose those who seek to offer women alternatives to abortion and deny women the opportunity to know about other choices.
3. Democrats Want to Make Pro-Life Doctors and Nurses Perform Abortions
In the wake of Roe v. Wade, Democrats like Ted Kennedy spoke on the floor of the Senate to defend the right of pro-life medical professionals and hospitals not to perform abortions against their conscience. The conscience law he spoke in favor of, the Church Amendment, passed with only a single vote against it in each house.
But the Democratic Party has changed. Democrats are now ardent opponents of conscience rights, opposing laws that prevent forcing nurses like Cathy Cenzon-DeCarlo to participate in a late-term dismemberment abortion. Democrats nearly uniformly oppose the Abortion Nondiscrimination Act, the Health Care Conscience Rights Act, and similar proposals to simply protect the right of medical professionals to not participate in abortions.
Democrats don’t just support aborting seven-pound babies, they want to force pro-life doctors to perform them.
4. Democrats Want to Make You—and Your Church—Pay for Abortions
Not content to simply make abortion legal through all nine months, Democrats also want you to foot the bill. The federal Hyde Amendment, which provides some protection against taxpayer funding for abortion, passed over Democratic objection and continues to be in Democrats’ crosshairs. As it stands, with Hyde in place, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars go to abortionists. Without Hyde, it would be hundreds of millions more, as taxpayer funds could be used to directly pay for abortions themselves. Democrats even oppose bills fighting female sex trafficking over their passion for forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for abortion.
But it doesn’t end there. Democrats don’t just want to force you to pay for abortion through your taxes, some of them want to force you to pay for abortion in the church offering plate. In California, a Democratic administration has illegally forced every health plan in the state—including those churches provide for their pastors—to cover all legal abortions. That would include abortions of seven-pound, full-term babies. If your California church has an insurance plan, then it’s paying for others’ abortions.
Because this order directly violates federal law, Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a complaint on behalf of seven California churches with the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights. After eight months, the administration still has not acted to stop California from violating the federal Weldon Amendment by forcing churches to pay for abortions.
Democrats don’t just want abortions of seven-pound babies, many of them also want you and your church to pay for them.
5. Democrats Want to Permit the Most Barbaric and Dehumanizing Abortion Methods
Democrats are big on abortion euphemisms. When they say, as Wasserman-Shultz did, that abortion should be a woman’s “choice” through all nine months, they want you to focus on something other than the reality of what abortion is. Simply put, there is no clean and humane way to kill a seven-pound, full-term baby.
But Democrats have defended any abortion method, no matter how brutal. They fought to retain partial-birth abortion. Recently, when an Oklahoma bill prohibiting dismemberment abortions (ripping unborn children apart) became law, Democrats were the only votes against it—and the Democrats who didn’t vote against it left the chamber rather than vote for the law.
Democrats do not merely support aborting seven-pound, full-term babies, they continue to support the most barbaric possible ways of doing so.
The new attention to Democrats’ abortion extremism is welcome. But as horrific as abortions on seven-pound, full-term babies are, it is sad, but true, to say that the Democratic Party’s abortion views are much more extreme than that.
