During this weekend’s interview with Donald Trump, new “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker unfurled many of the usual deceitful assertions regarding abortion.
When the GOP presidential candidate argued, for example, that Democrats don’t support any limitations on the procedure, sometimes even after birth, Welker responded by saying, “Democrats are not talking about that … only 1 percent of late-term abortions happen, and always in the state of crisis.”
Only 1 percent, you say? Only less than 1 percent of homicides are of the mass shooting variety, and even fewer occur in schools. Would Welker frame school shootings as unimportant or unworthy of further policy discussion? After all, no Republican is “talking about” shooting up schools.
It is true that late-term abortions make up about 1 percent of the total, which is to say around 10,000 viable humans are being aborted at 21 weeks or older each year every year. Well, “only” 10,000, apparently.
And if Democrats aren’t “talking about that” then how is it that “all-trimester” abortion clinics are operating in Maryland and elsewhere? Why is Warren Hern as busy as ever in his Boulder chop shop — where he admits to performing late-term abortions on perfectly healthy women and babies? As we know, most late-term abortions are, like others, not induced in a “state of crisis” but used as a form of birth control.
Hern operates in Colorado, where the abortion of viable unborn children is legal, for any reason, until crowning. The law goes on to praise the “social, moral, and economic benefits” of having abortions. It does not even mention viability, like Casey and Roe did, but rather strips the baby of any “independent or derivative rights under the laws of the state” at any time during the pregnancy.
Moreover, Welker’s claim that Democrats “writ large” are not arguing for stripping limits is objectively false. Only two Democrats in Congress voted against a federal bill that would not only allow all post-viability abortions with the approval of a “health-care provider” — it doesn’t have to be a doctor — if it “would pose a risk” to the patient’s life or “health,” which includes any mental health problem, carte blanche for unlimited abortion.
It should be noted that Democrats are also opposed to compelling doctors to provide infants who survive attempted abortions the minimum amount of care they would be expected to provide any other person.
So, yes, they are very much arguing for “that.”
“How is it acceptable in America that women’s lives are at risk,” Welker begged the question, “that doctors are being forced to turn away patients in need, or risk breaking the law?”
This does not happen. There is no such force. There is no such policy. Every state law restricting abortion offers explicit exceptions for the life or physical health of the mother. No one wants to put mothers in danger. Though a number of activists contend otherwise for political reasons — Welker, who showed a complete lack of journalistic skepticism, parroted those claims — they are untrue.
Even the six-week Florida restriction that Trump called “terrible” — he’s very wrong about that — legalizes abortion up to 15 weeks in cases of rape, incest, or human trafficking, and allows abortion even later in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities or whenever the mother’s life or serious physical health is at risk.
When it comes to abortion, the media engage in a pedantic parsing of the left’s position. Since Democrats aren’t affirmatively proposing women seek out late-term abortions — no one is “talking about that,” says Welker — one can’t claim that they support the practice. This is a ridiculous standard. It would be tantamount to arguing that Republicans don’t support violent felons owning fully automatic weapons after proposing to strip every restriction of firearm ownership. It’s completely dishonest.
