As Alabama and Georgia passed laws restricting or nearly banning abortion, the attacks poured in from every angle. As varied as these attacks were, there was a common theme: dishonesty and falsehood.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, wrote on Twitter, “Alabama lawmakers are making all abortions a felony punishable w jailtime,incl women victimized by rape+incest.”
Whether intentionally or not, this viral tweet (retweeted 16,000 times) clearly implies that the bill would punish mothers who get abortion. That’s false, and it’s a fairly standard lie of abortion defenders.
Some of the attacks are newer. One increasingly popular attack is that abortion opponents are uninterested in saving lives but are merely trying to harm women and control their lives.
“The movement is anti-woman,” liberal-legal-scholar-turned-resistance-tweeter Laurence Tribe wrote about pro-lifers. Liberal New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote of pro-lifers in Alabama and Georgia that their “goal, ultimately, is the restoration of an imagined past and reestablishment of rigid hierarchies of gender and race.”
Liberal commentator David Klion told pro-lifer David French that French supports the law “because you hate women and want more of them to die.”
This is all based on the lie that only men are interested in restricting abortion.
Alabamans believe by a 58% to 37% margin that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, according to a 2014 Pew poll. That obviously isn’t just men. The most recent nationwide poll found majority support among both men and women for bills barring abortion after the baby’s heartbeat is detectable, with no statistically significant difference between the sexes’ views.
The bill was drafted and introduced by Rep. Terri Collins, a female lawmaker. It was signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey, a woman. It mirrors the policy preferences of most Alabama women.
In this light, consider the arguments from men like Tribe, Bouie, Klion, and dozens of others. Either they are lying by pretending all women support legalized abortion, or they are explaining to most women in Alabama: Oh dear, you merely think you care for the life of the unborn, but really, you want the state to control women’s lives and bodies.
Many of the lies in defense of abortion are decades old.
Abortion advocates have long claimed that it is needed in order to curb overpopulation. That myth has been punctured, as births have been dropping in the U.S. even as abortion has declined over the past decade.
The only reason abortion bans had to be passed this month in Alabama and Georgia was the lies that are Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. These shoddy decisions were based on fictional rights invented through the discredited idea of substantive due process. The legal and constitutional reasoning behind them was nonexistent, even pro-choice legal scholars have admitted.
So why do abortion’s defenders base their arguments so much on lies? In part, it’s because they can get away with it. The abortion lobby has perhaps the most sophisticated public relations machine in America, and reporters take their talking points as gospel.
But there’s another possible explanation. Maybe abortion defenders base their argument on so many lies because they have to. Because a big lie is the foundation of their view.
One telling objection to the Georgia heartbeat bill was the absurd claim that the beating heart of a baby in utero is not a heartbeat. It’s merely “fetal pole activity,” progressive celebrity Alyssa Milano argued.
The lie goes deeper, though, and usually has to go unspoken. But sometimes they say it out loud.
“When a woman is pregnant,” Democrat Christine Quinn said recently, “that is not a human being inside of her.”
And there we have it.
