Perspective: Republicans are pushing another false claim about abortion to rile up voters
Antiabortion activists protest outside the Supreme Court during the March for Life in Washington in January. By Laura Bassett Laura Bassett is a freelance journalist and commentator on politics, gender and culture. April 10 at 12:56 PM Listening to Republicans over the past few months, it would be easy to get the impression that women are routinely giving birth to babies and then aborting them — with Democrats’ full political support.
Part of the reason Republicans have been able to make some headway with this line of attack is that Ralph Northam, Virginia’s Democratic governor, garbled his response to a similar bill proposed in his state in January, misspeaking in a way that appeared to endorse afterbirth abortion and sparking a national firestorm. Soon afterward, New York enacted a bill that would allow abortions after 24 weeks in the absence of fetal viability, or to protect the mother’s life or health.
Republicans had apparently learned from 2012’s “Year of the Woman,” when an unprecedented gender gap at the polls led President Barack Obama to a crushing victory over Mitt Romney, that playing defense on reproductive rights isn’t a winning strategy for them.
Their enthusiasm paid off in a big way, with two new antiabortion justices on the Supreme Court. Trump and Republicans have failed, so far, to defund Planned Parenthood, despite many conservative congressmen listing it as their top legislative priority and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress for two years. Trump did reinstate the “global gag rule” on abortion and allowed states to defund Planned Parenthood, but then lost control of the House by a landslide in 2018.
Brazenly gunning to overturn Roe, a broadly popular legal precedent that prevented women from dying in unsafe procedures, is not going to win an election for Republicans. But if they can refocus national attention on the image of a baby born alive in a failed abortion, they could change the debate from being about a woman’s body, her health and her rights to being about an infant. The woman disappears entirely.
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