Some truths are too terrible to accept.
America’s polarized political and media landscape allows partisans to exist in their own cloistered worlds, free from facts that might challenge their priors.
But no group is as insulated from reality as pro-choicers, who are invariably sheltered from the disturbing position on late-term abortion taken by its fanatical champions in the Democratic Party.
Donald Trump has repeatedly fallen victim to the establishment’s helicopter-parent treatment of this coddled cohort.
At last week’s presidential debate, for example, Trump painted an accurate if unfocused portrait of Democrats’ radicalism.
It started with his reference to former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s infamous 2019 comments on a Virginia late-term abortion bill that was then being considered in the state legislature.
“[Northam] said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” recalled Trump.
“That’s not OK with me,” he continued.
Linsey Davis, ABC’s shameless moderator, punctuated Trump’s answer with everything but a snicker.
“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” she proclaimed smugly.
The thing about being smug? You had better be right.
Trump was imprecise, but it was Davis who got it wrong.
Abortionists might not be “executing” children born alive after botched abortions — but they do sometimes withhold care from them, effectively finishing the ghastly job they set out to accomplish.
This was the context of Northam’s comments, which came in defense of a bill allowing elective abortions for non-medical reasons through all nine months of pregnancy.
“When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physician,” said Northam.
“And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable.”
“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” he added.
“The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
Democrats and their media allies have used Northam’s claims about deformities and non-viable fetuses to argue that those are the only instances in which infants might have life-saving care withheld from them.
But that’s not what he or the bill he was campaigning for actually said.
No deformities or fatal conditions would have been required ahead of a “discussion” about whether to condemn a newborn to death.
Some states have laws that protect abortion survivors from monstrous zealots like Northam — but Democrats in Congress have repeatedly trotted out a series of absurd excuses to explain why they oppose the federal Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act.
Bear this in mind: The Born-Alive Act would do nothing to limit abortion.
Its only function would be to require proper medical care for abortion survivors — and to penalize abortionists who purposefully allow living, breathing children to die in front of them, as has occurred in states like Minnesota.
Instead of asking Harris why she and her allies would oppose this common-sense measure, Davis opted for an erroneous “fact check” of Trump.
Harris insisted, “It’s insulting to the women of America” to suggest that anyone might carry a baby nearly to term and then seek an abortion.
Trump asked the obvious question Davis wouldn’t.
“Will she allow abortion in the eighth month, ninth month, seventh month?” he wondered aloud.
“Come on,” Harris answered.
But what she meant was, “Yes.”
It’s an affront, Harris huffed, to suggest that anyone might seek a late-term abortion . . . but it’s also essential to make them readily available.
And such abortions are not rare.
The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute has estimated about 1.3% of American abortions are carried out on unborn children who would have been viable outside the womb.
That means at least 13,000 gruesome late-term abortions were performed in the US in 2023, based on Guttmacher’s figures.
Roughly two-thirds of the country thinks all such abortions should be illegal, according to an NPR/PBS poll released last year.
Harris can bristle all she wants; she’s lucky Trump wasn’t even harsher in his indictment of such barbarism.
The Supreme Court’s consignment of Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history was a boon to the pro-life movement, but what followed revealed the harsh truth that its activists had failed to win Americans’ hearts and minds.
Pro-life lawmakers must now persuade them — and contend with hard cases that test ideological preferences.
For them, the ongoing abortion debate is filled with tough decisions and unpalatable compromises.
But Democrats cannot blind themselves to the truth of their own party’s stance.
Pro-choicers must be made to grapple with their own hard cases — and must denounce the enthusiasts among them that go to the mat for atrocities while lying to the American people about it.
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