Jimmy Kimmel recently featured an abortion skit on his show criticizing pro-life legislation, specifically in Alabama. While this mockery of pro-lifers may have been entertaining for Kimmel’s liberal audience, it contained a number of critical errors that exposed how uninformed the comedian is on this issue.
Kimmel opened with a cheap joke, saying, “Pro-lifers insist they’re not anti-choice, they say they’re still free to pick the name of the baby, with the husband’s permission of course.”
Contrary to Kimmel’s implication, pro-lifers do in fact support many different choices for women. In addition to abstinence and parenting, there’s also adoption. Additionally, many pro-lifers support contraception, and even those who oppose contraception on moral grounds are not trying to outlaw it for others. Pro-lifers support many different choices. We just don’t support the one that involves killing.
Meanwhile, many pro-lifers donate money to pregnancy help centers so that they can offer women free or low-cost healthcare for themselves and their child, in addition to day care, toys, diapers, and other necessities. The lie that pro-lifers stop caring about children once they’re born is just that — a lie.
The remainder of Kimmel’s segment featured a commercial-like skit where a woman who is denied access to a Plan B pill and must jump through several hoops in an attempt to abort her child. It’s worth noting that the Plan B pill, otherwise referred to as “emergency contraception,” might act as an abortifacient rather than a contraceptive if it is taken after conception has occurred. Regardless, Kimmel’s claim that Alabama’s new abortion law bans Plan B pills is false. Plan B remains legal, whatever the courts say about Alabama’s law.
So the central premise of Kimmel’s skit is blatantly false, but the lies didn’t stop there.
In the skit, after Alabama bill becomes law, there is a “women’s clinic” on the side of the road that has been closed down. Ironically, this undermines the abortion lobby’s premise that abortion is only 3% of what Planned Parenthood (and similar clinics) does. Why would a clinic go out of business from losing such a tiny fraction of its services? Evidently, pro-choice ideologues need to get on the same page with their messaging. Either abortion is only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does, or abortion is vital to Planned Parenthood’s survival and mission, such that banning it will send their clinics out of business. Both cannot be true.
Because the Alabama clinic in the skit is closed, the woman drives to Georgia, where she meets a sketchy “doctor” for a back-alley abortion. It’s anyone’s guess why she would drive from the state with the most restrictive abortion ban to the state with the second-most restrictive ban to attempt a back-alley abortion. After deciding not to have the back-alley abortion, the woman is shown in the classic Handmaid’s Tale costume, looking depressed as ever with twin babies in her arms.
Pro-choice ideologues and their liberal lackeys like Kimmel continue to insist that overturning Roe v. Wade would mean the end of abortion (and contraception) in America, when the reality is far from that. In fact, the fight to overturn Roe is really just, ironically, a fight for choice, and the beginning rather than the end of the abortion debate.
If Roe is overturned, abortion will remain legal in most states, although it will likely be regulated more closely, subsidized less, and restricted based on voters’ input. Currently, pro-life states can barely regulate abortionists at all (witness the struggle to close a shady unlicensed abortion clinic in Missouri) thanks to Roe. Whereas we hear so much about a “woman’s right to choose” to terminate her child, which is nowhere in the Constitution, pro-lifers are essentially advocating for the voters’ right to choose their own laws weighing the health and safety of mother and child alike — something explicitly guaranteed to state governments by the 10th Amendment.
