The Democrats’ relationship with people with disabilities has always been defined by contradiction. On the one hand, the party likes to evince compassion for the weak and vulnerable. But on the other, Democrats hold up abortion as a supreme right, especially when it targets unborn babies with disabilities, as it increasingly does.
This is the conflict that Hillary Clinton faces as she attempts to woo voters with disabilities and their families. She has recently delivered several speeches about fully integrating people with disabilities into the economy. And her campaign has enlisted hundreds of advocates for disabled people, who are putting out the word on social media that Clinton will be their advocate.
But while Clinton is focusing much of her pitch to people with disabilities on economic concerns, she is ignoring the existential threats to the disabled that she and her party have spent decades creating.
One in five people have a disability, and almost every voter has a loved one who is affected by one disability or another, so it’s smart politics to seem on their side. What’s more, many people with disabilities and their advocates feel their voices are often lost in the political debate. A particular concern for Clinton is that her opponent, Donald Trump, has consistently polled well ahead of her among military vets, four million of whom have service-related disabilities.
But it is on abortion and other reproductive issues that she is most vulnerable when she addresses disabled voters. Millions of people have disabilities that become apparent in utero, and Clinton’s policies would make destroying unborn lives much easier and more common.
An exchange Clinton once had with Rick Santorum is emblematic of her eugenic mentality. In a 2003 Senate debate over partial-birth abortion, Clinton chided Santorum for displaying pictures of a partial-birth abortion without showing the “swollen heads” of babies with disabilities. The photos “show a perfectly formed fetus,” she said, “and that is misleading. Because if we are really going to have this debate, then we should have a chart that demonstrates the tragic abnormalities that confront women forced with this excruciatingly difficult decision.”
The implication was that the prospect of having a baby with a disability should make everyone more sympathetic to abortion, even abortions performed moments before birth.
Democrats have pushed through liberal laws on abortion that have resulted in a 90 percent abortion rate for babies with Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis and other genetic conditions. Last spring, Clinton blasted state laws designed to prohibit abortions based specifically on fetal disability.
Meanwhile, left-liberal politicians and judges who share Clinton’s mindset are responsible for laws in 28 states that recognize “wrongful birth” lawsuits, in which parents of disabled children are given vast payouts when doctors don’t inform them of a disability in their unborn child in time for them to abort.
And it was one of Clinton’s favorite Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said a few years ago that one of the points or Roe v. Wade was to weed out “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Ginsburg was echoing Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, an early 20th century eugenicist who preached, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.” Once after receiving an award in Sanger’s name, Clinton said she stood “in awe of” of her.
The bottom line is that Clinton and the Democratic Party are in thrall to the abortion lobby, and nobody, not even the weakest and most vulnerable among us, can soften their hearts on that.
