When Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris, fans of the HBO series Veep didn’t miss the similar plot twist. Harris and the Democrats have embraced the comparison, even to the point of having actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the show’s fictional vice president, lead a women governors’ panel at their convention in Chicago.
It’s awkward. Veep satirizes a vulgar and cutthroat, albeit bumbling, political culture where the players will do anything to get and keep power. Someone should remind the Democrats it isn’t a guide – especially when it comes to turning their convention into an “abortion-palooza,” complete with a Planned Parenthood bus offering free abortions and demonstrators dressed in abortion-drug costumes.
Season 3 of the show finds Vice President Selina Meyer suddenly having to confront the issue of abortion, trying to juggle emissaries from both sides while desperately conferring with staff about what her opinion should be. Years before pollster Celinda Lake advised Democrats that “Debating weeks is not where we want to be,” Veep gave us a character struggling to draw a line—any line—on how late abortion should be allowed. Twenty-two weeks? Twenty-four weeks?
Pressed to take a position but finding no help in polls, Meyer waffles until her staffers can’t stand her indecision anymore. In public, she offers substance-free platitudes about “freedom.” In private, a cynical quip reveals her actual views: “If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion at an ATM.” The vocally pro-abortion Louis-Dreyfus reprised that quote during her panel this week, saying, “I stand by that as a human being.” Maybe somehow she didn’t see the huge bus outside the event.
Vice President Kamala Harris, too, dodges when pressed to name any limits on abortion she supports. Last September she spent more than four minutes refusing to answer questions about her stance in an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation. In reality, polls show an overwhelming consensus of seven in 10 Americans that there should be significant limits on abortion. Imagine Harris explaining why she and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, not only back legislation to override all state laws on abortion – even in the seventh, eighth and ninth months when unborn babies can feel pain – but also voted to block medical care for babies who survive an abortion attempt. It’s no mystery why she would rather be vague.
Fast forward to the last season. Meyer’s very type-A chief of staff, Amy (played by Anna Chlumsky), is pregnant after a one-night stand with fellow staffer Dan (played by Reid Scott). Amy briefly contemplates keeping the child, but Dan – whose idea of taking responsibility is “going Dutch” to pay for an abortion via Venmo – talks her out of it. At the abortion center, Amy curses out pro-lifers outside. Dan, implausibly allowed into the procedure room with her, declares himself the “proud father-to-not-be” and even identifies and compliments the equipment, indicating it’s not his first time. Amy, meanwhile, can’t get it over with fast enough: “I am as sure as I will be.”
Chlumsky gave us a glimpse of her character’s mindset in a Hollywood Reporter interview:
"Amy tried to imagine what her future would look like if she kept the baby. She gave Dan many chances to show a glimmer of hope that he could change. 'It’s all about reading the odds sheets — she’s always reading the Vegas board of her life,' Chlumsky adds…'To Amy, the odds work out if this guy that she’s actually in love with could change. And when she makes the phone call [to schedule the abortion], I think she realized Dan’s not changing. That he’s a sex addict, not the guy she needs him to be and definitely not the guy that a child would need him to be,' she says."
One key aspect of this story is true to life: the role of other people, particularly the baby’s father. Nearly 70% of women who’ve had abortions say it wasn’t consistent with their own values and preferences, with a quarter describing their abortions as unwanted or coerced. Extrapolated to estimates of national abortion numbers, as many as a quarter of a million American women each year may be experiencing coerced and unwanted abortions. When women come forward to tell their stories, two common themes are men who are disengaged at best, and bullying from the abortion industry itself. Looking back on their abortion experience, 60% wish they’d had the emotional or financial support to carry to term. When Amy takes a day off, Meyer quickly says to dock her pay.
In 2024, in an all-too-real Zoom call titled “White Dudes for Harris,” Democrats let the truth slip: no-limits abortion means more freedom for men like Veep’s Dan. If women and children get hurt, well, it takes breaking a few eggs to get an omelet, doesn’t it? Catherine Herring’s estranged husband tried to slip her an abortion drug seven times to kill their unborn child (it didn’t work, but put Catherine in the hospital). The husband only got 180 days’ sentence. The state of Louisiana subsequently outlawed coerced abortion by means of fraud. Kamala Harris and the Democrats not only didn’t care – they lied to America about the circumstances that gave rise to the law. Despite their talking point that abortion is “between a woman and her doctor,” their lax policies have made it easy to get dangerous drugs by mail without any doctor appointment at all.
Democrats trumpeting “reproductive freedom” don’t talk about coercion to abort. The abortion lobby wants to sweep it under the rug and pretend it rarely happens. But in no-limits Minnesota, Tim Walz went out of his way to strip protections against coercion from the law. Harris and numerous other Democrats are on a mission to defund and shut down pregnancy centers, ensuring that women under pressure have nowhere else to turn. Thank goodness for brave women raising their voices with a vital message: “Value us, not just abortion.”
Veep’s creators caution audiences that their satire is make-believe. But the Democrats don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Their National Abortion Convention proves that a Harris-Walz win would make the show’s abortion hellscape all too real for the entire nation.
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