House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ignored a male reporter’s questions on late-term abortion Thursday afternoon, and instead suggested that it was inappropriate for a man to ask her about childbirth.
“Is an unborn baby with a human heart and human liver a human being?” asked CNS News’ Sam Dorman.
“Why don’t you take your ideological questions … I don’t know who you are, and you’re welcome to be here and freedom of this press,” the California congresswoman said, as the reporter also asked her “what species” is a fetus.
“I am a devout, practicing Catholic. A mother of five children. When my baby was born, my firth child, my oldest child, was six years old. I think I know more about this subject than you, with all due respect,” she added.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a grave, moral evil, and the punishment for either procuring or participating in one is automatic excommunication (also referred to as “excommunication latae sententiae“). The Church requires no less than a bishop to lift the title of excommunication.
Pelosi concluded her response by saying she did “not intend” to answer his question.
Though the former House speaker is indeed a mother of five children, her response nevertheless failed to address Dorman’s initial question. Despite the non-answer, however, a few newsrooms saw Pelosi’s response as fierce rejoinder to Dorman’s inquiry.
“Pelosi shuts down reporter on abortion: ‘I know more about this subject than you,'” read a Hill headline.
Talking Points Memo characterized her non-answer as a “smack down.”
Salon referred to the encounter as a “mic-dropping moment.”
Spurred by a series of secretly recorded videos from a pro-life activist groups, congressional Republicans have moved in recent moths to strip all federal funding from Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions.
Democratic and GOP lawmakers sympathetic to the “women’s health organization” have enthusiastically opposed all such defunding efforts. Pelosi was among a number of Democrats who gathered this week for an event to show “solidarity” with Planned Parenthood.
