House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- who is reportedly sniffing around for a new job, perhaps because despite her public comments, she doesn't believe she'll have the gavel much longer -- once again weighed in on abortion yesterday, mocking pro-life Republicans. This is the snarky line that has been getting some attention, as was clearly the goal when she said it:
Pelosi: There are those in the Republican Party who think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before. pic.twitter.com/MrxNAUtplI
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 14, 2022
Many pro-lifers believe that human life begins at conception, for which there is a scientific basis. That's the position that Pelosi is ridiculing here, making it sound cartoonish and dismissing it as silly and frivolous. It also happens to be the stance of the Catholic Church. I only mention that because Pelosi ostentatiously reminds anyone who will listen about her supposedly very devout Catholicism, though she's aggressively hostile to this particular value and teaching of her espoused faith. Her answer comes in the context of Sen. Lindsey Graham's 15-week abortion limitation bill, which is generating all sorts of criticism. The Left is screaming that it's a national abortion ban. It's not. It's a restriction on most late-term abortions, which is not the same thing at all. I'll address that more in a moment. On the Right, I've seen minimal criticism that Graham's bill doesn't go far enough. I've seen plenty of criticism that it's a distraction from issues like inflation, and poorly timed. This intense exchange between Graham and Fox's Jesse Watters speaks to that dispute. I've also seen some Republicans like Mitch McConnell say that certain members of the party would like to keep the issue at the state level, which was a major conservative talking point after the Dobbs decision was released. Elsewhere in her remarks, Pelosi dinged Republicans over this, too.
While I understand the point on timing -- releasing an abortion bill on the day Democrats were having a disastrous inflation 'celebration' -- the substance of Graham's bill is solid. It is a very reasonable bill that falls squarely within the American mainstream. A ban on most abortions after 15 weeks, with a few exceptions, is sensible, and even more permissive than laws on the books in many Western nations, including France. The United States has been a grotesque pro-abortion global outlier for years. Democrats have been attacking Republicans in tons of ads over the prospect of total abortion bans, some featuring women getting arrested. This is a mischaracterization on several levels, but Republicans would be in a much better position debating a 15-week restriction than ceding the field to Democrats' distortions. Democrats would almost all oppose a policy that has majority support. This only helps underscore their extremism on the issue, which they are not eager to talk about.
As for the 'leave it to the states' complaint, I understand it, but I think it's wrong. Republicans have voted to ban the heinous procedure of partial-birth abortion at the federal level (and guess who once supported it). They just recently voted for a 20-week ban at the federal level, which most Senate Democrats filibustered. Nearly every Democrat in Congress just recently supported a gruesome bill to nationalize our abortion laws, allowing abortion-on-demand, for any reason, through all nine months of pregnancy, funded by taxpayers. I believe that some abortion questions should be left to the states. Not all states are as pro-life or pro-choice as others, and in our country, a top-down, one-size-fits-all policy isn't optimal. But protecting innocent life from elective late-term abortions seems entirely ethical, from a human rights perspective. "Sensible and humane" is right. Not everyone agrees that life begins at conception, or that human life should be legally protected from that point forward. But there's a meaningful consensus that late-pregnancy elective abortions are wrong. This is not some meaningless, dehumanized clump of cells:
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At 15 weeks, “Your baby is looking more like a little person, with eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, hair, & well-defined fingers and toes. If you could see inside your womb, you'd catch your baby sucking a thumb, yawning, stretching, and making faces” https://t.co/BPPY512oBZ https://t.co/vlpcXbSbJ5 pic.twitter.com/QtaqGJs2RC
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) September 13, 2022
That's a person, to me. At some point, an embryo becomes a fetus -- and at some point, fetuses deserve rights. We don't all have the same views on when that point ought to be, but a huge majority of us agree it's significantly before birth. Pelosi has no standing to lecture anyone else on abortion extremism. Short of endorsing compulsory abortions, she is as extreme as it comes. She's championed appalling 'no limits' legislation, and wouldn't even condemn terrorist attacks against pro-life centers that help offer women a choice not to abort their pregnancies. While these organizations are fire-bombed and threatened for the offense of not being pro-abortion, elected Democrats are seeking to persecute them politically, too. It's disgusting. Agree or disagree with Graham's proposal, it's much more moderate, reasonable, and widely-favored than Pelosi's ghoulish position.
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