Gaslighting on abortion

The implicit assumption here is that Republicans are dishonestly framing Democrats’ abortion policy and the popularity of their approach. This premise is inaccurate, and it exemplifies the way reporters gaslight the public and enable Democrats to avoid accountability for their extremism.

In fact, Republicans aren’t mischaracterizing the issue at all. Democratic politicians have spent 2019 pushing policies to allow abortion after fetal viability and, indeed, up until birth. These laws are favored not by a majority of Americans or even a majority of Democratic voters but by abortion rights activists at Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

[Related: Supreme Court decides on long-watched abortion case]

A 2018 Gallup poll found that only 13% of Americans would allow abortion during the last three months of pregnancy, while a Marist poll from January found that more than three-quarters favor limiting abortion to, at most, the first three months of pregnancy, a statistic that includes majorities of both Democrats and pro-abortion Americans. There is not yet an anti-abortion majority in the United States, but there is almost no popular support to speak of for the Democratic Party’s platform on the issue.

Even so, its politicians suffer few consequences for this zealotry. Why?

For one thing, abortion rights advocates rely on the media to mislead Americans about the Left’s stance on this issue. Ostensibly objective journalists all too often operate a spin shop for liberal leaders. Instead of reporting that laws permitting post-viability abortion have little public support, even on the Left, media outlets reframe the issue to claim that Republicans are “weaponizing” abortion to smear Democrats. It’s an attempt not to have a debate but to shut down disagreement by delegitimizing one side.

More important, this misinformation is compounded by the abortion rights movement’s use of euphemisms to disguise the reality of what the right to abortion really guarantees. It understandably would be challenging to openly demand the unfettered right to kill living human beings in the womb, and that, of course, is the clinical reality of every abortion procedure. We all know and comprehend that reality, though many prefer not to admit it, even to themselves.

[Also read: Missouri governor hits back at Planned Parenthood: ‘Disregard for the law’]

Rather than affirming that abortion kills a human being and defending it on those terms, abortion rights supporters must lean on obfuscations. They speak in terms of “women’s rights” and “women’s healthcare” and “reproductive freedom” and the “right to choose.” They dismiss unborn human beings as “clumps of cells” and “products of conception” and “part of the mother.” Even basic characteristics of humanity get this treatment: “Dear Press,” actress and high-profile feminist activist Alyssa Milano tweeted recently, “Stop calling them ‘heartbeat’ bills and call them ‘fetal pole cardiac activity’ bills.”

These evasive, often deceitful phrases are the chief reason why our abortion debate is dysfunctional. They’re also why politicians and activists and pundits on the Left get away with promoting a deeply unpopular position.

If abortion is just like having a tooth pulled, then surely a woman has a “right to choose.” But if there is a second, individual human being involved, invoking women’s autonomy is no longer enough. Defending a woman’s right to control her own healthcare is a much less daunting task than defending her choice to dispense with a distinct human life developing inside her. So euphemism reigns.

But the mask is slipping. Unfortunately for the new Orwellians, they have begun to undermine their own word games with their public actions. Even as medical technology enables prematurely delivered infants to survive earlier and earlier in pregnancy, elected Democrats fight to allow abortion, for any reason, later and later in pregnancy, even until birth.

[Read: Louisiana Democrats defy party orthodoxy by backing abortion ban]

Their recent policy initiatives have revealed that Democratic lawmakers view abortion not as the right to “terminate a pregnancy” — which, in the case of a viable infant, would entail merely delivering it — but as the right to terminate the life of a human being, no matter how much it has developed and no matter where it is located.

So far this year, in several states including Illinois, Vermont, and Rhode Island, Democratic legislatures have considered bills to define abortion as a fundamental right and to dehumanize unborn children by denying them all legal rights.

In January, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill sanctioning abortion for any reason whatsoever until 24 weeks, at which point many newborns are viable, and creating lenient health exceptions to make it easier for women to obtain an abortion up until the moment of delivery. When it passed, Democratic state senators stood and applauded.

Shortly thereafter, Democrats in Virginia proposed expanding abortion access during the last three months of pregnancy, allowing women to abort a healthy, viable fetus if an abortionist certified that a mother’s mental or psychological health would benefit from it. During a hearing, Democratic Del. Kathy Tran notoriously said her bill contained no limits to prevent a woman from obtaining such an abortion during labor.

Asked to explain Tran’s comments, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam touched off a firestorm. “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam said. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

[Opinion: Kathy Tran cares more for butterflies than babies in the womb]

Northam later tried to backtrack, claiming that he had been referencing cases where the infant was “nonviable” or had “severe fetal abnormalities.” But the Virginia law wasn’t limited to cases involving sick babies, and Northam wasn’t talking about providing the best medical care to a nearly aborted infant. He was talking about giving mothers the power of life and death over their unwanted newborns, children that were meant to have been aborted one moment earlier.

The damage was done. In one interview, Northam had revealed the moral bankruptcy and ghoulish coherence of the case for unlimited abortion rights. If an unwanted child can be killed one minute before delivery or during delivery, why must a mother be forced to let it survive outside the womb? It is, after all, the same child.

The Senate debate in February over the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act revealed the Virginia governor wasn’t alone in his gruesome opinion. The bill, introduced by Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., in response to Northam’s actions, was simple. It would require doctors to provide the same medical care to infants that survive attempted abortions that they would provide to any other infant of the same gestational age.

It was not an “anti-abortion” bill, contrary to reams of coverage labeling it as such. It didn’t restrict abortion access in any way, nor did it prescribe any particular kind of medical care for infants that survive an abortion. And yet 44 Senate Democrats lined up to oppose it.

Voting against a bill that would do nothing more than require adequate care for newborns, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., said the legislation “puts Congress in the middle of the important medical decisions that patients and doctors should make together without political interference.”

“The bill is solely meant to intimidate doctors and restrict patients’ access to care and has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with protecting children,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

[Related: Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signs nation’s strictest abortion bill into law]

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., claimed the born-alive bill “would interfere with the doctor–patient relationship and impose new obstacles to a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own decisions about her reproductive health.”

“Conservative politicians should not be telling doctors how they should care for their patients,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii. “Instead, women, in consultation with their families and doctors, are in the best position to determine their best course of care.”

None of this was at issue; the bill’s text was straightforward. We are left to believe, then, either that Democrats didn’t bother to read the legislation they so vehemently opposed, that they invented fictions about it for political profit, or, most frightening of all, that they sincerely think the right to let a newborn infant perish from lack of care constitutes an acceptable exercise of “reproductive rights.”

Though Democrats were successful in blocking the bill, and though inaccurate media coverage ensured that the average American likely would never understand the significance of what had occurred, its ultimate triumph was in exposing the sinister rationale for abortion rights.

Senate Democrats were well aware that the born-alive bill didn’t restrict abortion access, but its simplicity put them in a bind. If they supported the bill, they would betray a logical inconsistency. How could they affirm the rights of a newborn infant while dehumanizing that very same human life, at the same stage of development, one minute earlier inside its mother?

[Opinion: Extreme abortion bill passes state legislature. Somehow, the uproar is missing]

But Democrats knew, too, that if they opposed the bill on its own terms, they would uncover the consistent principle undergirding the argument for abortion rights: the belief that a child’s rights depend not on her size or location, but on whether she is wanted by her mother.

In voting against the born-alive bill, they chose consistency, revealing the moral depravity of their argument and inadvertently acknowledging that the unborn child is the same human being at two weeks and two months, two moments before birth and two moments after.

This is why the Left relies on euphemism, why abortion rights supporters intentionally obscure what they’re advocating, and why it matters that reporters engage in the same rhetorical games as Democratic lawmakers. Most Americans disagree with the Democratic Party line on the issue. They just might not know what the Democratic Party’s line is.

Though these developments could be politically beneficial to the Republican Party in the long run, a watershed moment is likely still far off, especially as the Left continues to obscure its true position with a combination of deceptive talking points and media obfuscation. Even if the extremism of Democrats and abortion rights activists in the end buoys the anti-abortion movement, it is ominous to witness one of our two major political parties embracing policies that sanction the killing of nearly one million unborn human beings every year.

Alexandra DeSanctis is a staff writer at National Review.