Asked about abortion rights during the Oct. 7 vice-presidential debate, Democratic Party candidate Sen. Kamala Harris declared: “I will always fight for a woman’s right to make a decision about her own body. It should be her decision and not that of Donald Trump and the vice president, Michael Pence.”
In turn, Pence accused Joe Biden and Harris of supporting “taxpayer funding of abortion all the way up to the moment of birth,” a claim NPR labeled untrue. Yet the Democratic Party is indeed unabashedly pro-abortion, promoting policies to ensure abortions may be sex- and race-selective and taxpayer-paid, occur in the last month of pregnancy, and are done even by medical practitioners who conscientiously oppose them. Democrats also seek to limit pregnancy-center alternatives. They are, quite simply, the abortion party.
1. Democrats Support Aborting Babies Based on Race, Sex, or Disability
Democrats have consistently opposed legislation that seeks to limit abortions that are based on race, sex, or disabilities such as Down syndrome. When Oklahoma in February 2019 considered HB 1396, which would have prohibited abortion after the sex of the fetus is known, its only two opponents on the state legislature’s Public Health Committee were Democrats. TThe Democratic Party has a long history of opposition to such measures.
When the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012 considered the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, which would have prohibited abortions because of the father’s race or the unborn child’s sex, Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the bill. When a similar bill was codified in Arizona in 2011, it did so with the support of only two Democratic representatives out of a total 24 in the state’s legislature. Democrats opposed a similar bill in North Dakota in 2013.
Currently, 10 states ban abortions for reason of sex selection at some point in pregnancy, three states prohibit abortions for reasons of race, and three states prohibit abortions when the fetus might have a genetic anomaly. Harris aims to reverse such bans, endorsing the Women’s Health Protection Act.
She declared that “states that have a history of passing legislation that is designed to prevent or limit a woman’s access to reproductive health care” would be subject to review and approval by the Department of Justice. “Until we determine that they are constitutional, they will not take effect,” Harris said.
2. Democrats Support Taxpayer-Funded Abortions
Biden once supported the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of Medicaid dollars for abortion in most cases. Yet in June 2019, following significant criticism for this stance, Biden reversed his opinion and now opposes the amendment, a position shared by most Democrats — this, even though hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have gone to abortionists. Without Hyde, it would be hundreds of millions more. Harris has stated her desire to overturn Hyde, while Biden has promised to restore federal funding to Planned Parenthood.
During the primary, when asked by the Washington Post, “Should federal law require all private insurance plans to cover abortion?” most of the Democratic presidential candidates answered yes. Biden declined to answer that question. Harris has received a 100 percent rating from the pro-choice organization NARAL and has been labeled “one of Planned Parenthood’s most vocal supporters,” so one can only presume she also would answer in the affirmative.
3. Democrats Oppose Conscientious Objections for Pro-Life Medical Professionals
In 2019, Democrats in the House of Representatives submitted the Medicare for America Act (H.R. 2452), a new national health insurance program that clearly states conscience protections would not apply to any medical professional under any circumstance. It states, in part: “Health care providers and institutions are prohibited from denying covered individuals access to covered benefits and services because of their religious objections.”
Medical providers have sought to force medical professionals to participate in abortions, evidenced in such recent cases as a 2019 case in Vermont or Cathy Cenzon-DeCarlo v. The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in 2013. Democrats have nearly uniformly opposed the Abortion Nondiscrimination Act, the Health Care Conscience Rights Act, and other similar proposals to protect the right of medical professionals not to participate in abortions. NARAL, which at this point is basically an extension of the Democratic Party, explicitly rejects conscientious objector laws regarding abortion.
As attorney and theologian Kenneth Craycraft explains in a recent First Things article, as a U.S. senator Harris introduced the “Do No Harm Act,” which aimed to coerce religious individuals and organizations to engage in activities that directly violate their firmly held religious beliefs. This would include health-care-related activities tied to abortion, which explains why it received strong support from pro-abortion groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood.
4. Democrats Oppose Pregnancy Center Alternatives
Although crisis pregnancy centers have persuaded many prospective parents to avoid procuring an abortion, the Democratic Party has consistently attacked crisis pregnancy centers. In April 2019, Democrats criticized attempts to fund crisis pregnancy centers.
“The shift of funding toward [crisis pregnancy centers] that will not offer patients direct access to a broad range of contraceptive care and counseling is alarming,” wrote Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo. A 2015 blog post on Democrats.org claimed that crisis pregnancy centers “have zero understanding of what women’s health care is.”
Craycraft notes that Harris in 2015 was an “enthusiastic advocate of California’s so-called Reproductive FACT Act,” which forced pregnancy centers to inform clients where they could obtain free abortions, as well as to advertise abortion clinics. She even claimed to have “co-sponsored” the FACT Act.
5. Democrats Support Late-Term Abortion Methods
In a recent Federalist article, I noted that some leftists portray the dismembering and murdering of in-utero humans as “banal,” akin to getting an annual flu shot. Democrats have supported abortion in all of its ghastly forms. Senate Democrats (with the exceptions of Bob Casey, Doug Jones, and Joe Manchin) in February blocked a pair of Republican-sponsored bills that would have banned late-term abortions.
Kathy Tran, a Democratic representative to the Virginia legislature, during a January 2019 discussion of her bill that sought to repeal certain state restrictions on abortion, said her bill would allow for an abortion to occur when a woman is in labor and about to give birth (she later said she “misspoke”). During a subsequent interview, Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said that in the case of a birth of a child with “severe deformities,” the infant would be “resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.”
Democratic support for late-term abortions includes Harris. Even fact-checker Snopes acknowledged that the vice-presidential candidate “has advocated for policies that allow for late-term abortions, primarily when the mother’s life is at risk.” Moreover, if Harris truly is the future of the Democratic Party, this will be a future marked by ever-more extreme pro-abortion policies.
Harris has voted against legislation to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and in support of late-term abortions. In 2019 and 2020, she voted to refuse protections for babies born alive after an abortion. She has recently promised to codify Roe v. Wade, which would keep it in place even if the Supreme Court overturns it.
Pro-choice advocates like to drape abortion in libertarian language of freedom for individuals to control their bodies. Harris, for example, attempted a “gotcha” during Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial confirmation hearing by asking if he was aware of any laws that restricted male bodies. Of course, many laws restrict what both men and women can do with their bodies if it involves harming others. Americans cannot pump their body full of alcohol and get behind the wheel of a vehicle nor use their bodies to beat their fellow citizens into unconsciousness.
This same principle should apply to abortion: Women have a unique ability to carry and feed human life within their bodies. When they decide to “terminate a pregnancy,” they decide in favor of irreversibly harming another person. The exact geographic location of that child, who has just as much a right to live as the mother, is irrelevant.