Texas state senator Wendy Davis has been on a whirlwind media tour since her filibuster (and a screaming mob) blocked a vote on a bill that would ban most abortions during the final four months of pregnancy and improve safety standards at abortion facilities.
Davis has been asked many questions–about her shoes, what it was like to stand and talk for so long, and whether she’s offended by Gov. Rick Perry. But you’ll have to search very hard to find a tough question challenging Davis to defend her opposition to bill. Just take a look at the 20 questions Davis had to answer during four interviews with well-respected, mainstream journalists at CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS.
Here are the six (closely paraphrased) questions CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Davis last week:
Here are the six questions ABC’s Jeff Zeleny asked Davis on This Week:
Here are the four questions CBS’s Bob Schieffer asked Davis on Face the Nation:
And here are the four questions NBC’s David Gregory asked Davis on Meet the Press:
Out of these 20 questions, Davis wasn’t asked once to explain the difference between infanticide and late-term abortions.
Precisely one question (credit to David Gregory) dealt with the substance of the bill. Gregory prodded Davis to explain why the 20-week ban isn’t “reasonable” and “acceptable,” but he didn’t follow up when Davis’s answer made no sense.
Davis replied that there is a constitutional right to “these reproductive decisions up to the point of viability.” But medical advancements have moved the point of “viability” up to 20 weeks after conception, the point at which the Texas bill would protect life. As Dr. Colleen Malloy of Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine testified before Congress in 2012, “I’m here because it’s easy for me to imagine these babies at 20 to 24 weeks post-fertilization age because they are my patients in the NICU.”
So after all of these interviews, Davis hasn’t given a clear reason why she opposes a bill protecting the lives of babies old enough to be preemies cared for in the neonatal intensive care unit.
What legal limits, if any, does Davis support? Should elective, post-viability abortions be legal? (Yes, they do happen.) Why shouldn’t Texas establish regulations similar to the regulations Pennsylvania established in the wake of Kermit Gosnell in order to protect women from being killed by abortionists? Why shouldn’t a billion-dollar non-profit like Planned Parenthood be able to afford improvements to safety standards?
These are all simple, obvious questions that Davis hasn’t been asked during her whirlwind media tour. One pathetic softball interview might be written off as an outlier, but when CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS more or less play the same game, one can’t help but notice a pattern.
