Thursday

November 14th, 2024

Insight

Fact checked! Harris Is the Extremist

David Harsanyi

By David Harsanyi

Published Sept. 20, 2024

Fact checked! Harris Is the Extremist
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At one point during the Sept. 10 presidential debate, former President Donald Trump accused Democrats of not only supporting unlimited third-trimester abortions but the "execution" of babies after birth.

Once Trump wrapped up his rant, Linsey Davis, one of the ABC News moderators, "fact-checked" the former president, helpfully noting that "there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born."

If Trump had been better prepared, he could have pointed out that a senator named Kamala Harris, while running for president in 2020, opposed legislation that would have compelled doctors to provide infants who survive abortions the basic care they would any other human being in distress. So, not exactly "executing" babies. Just negligent homicide.

And ironically, it's because the contemporary left's position on abortion is so morally unfathomable that the media can gaslight voters.

The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, after all, simply required medical professionals to "exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age." Yet Harris and 40 other Democratic senators opposed it.

Most Democrats, however, argued the bill was superfluous because this sort of thing never ever happens — just like the late-term abortions of viable babies never happens. Tragically, this is untrue.

Just ask Tim Walz, Harris' running mate. The Minnesota governor might not believe free speech is an absolute right, but he has no problem making abortion one. Indeed, Walz overturned laws prohibiting coercing of women into abortions. He defunded pregnancy centers. He removed requirements for informed consent on abortion — or any consent, for that matter. And then he stripped any protections for babies who survived abortion attempts. Five babies were left to die in 2021.

Notwithstanding Harris' contrived laugh mocking the very notion she supports unfettered government-funded abortion from conception to delivery, as it stands, seven states, as well as Washington, D.C., have no gestational limits on the procedure. One allows abortions in the third trimester. Sixteen allow abortions after viability.

Indeed, during the debate, Trump was compelled to do the job of the ABC News moderators when he asked Harris to name a single restriction she supported. The vice president's word salad offered none. Harris, instead, claimed she wanted to codify the "protections" of Roe.

Let's remember two things about this misleading talking point.

First, by the time Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was decided, Roe had no enforceable protections. Zero. When the Atlantic interviewed the Colorado butcher Warren Hern last year, he'd already spent 50 years terminating the lives of completely viable babies in the third trimester. He did it under Roe v. Wade.

Hern also admitted most of his victims were physically healthy. Which is unsurprising. Not long ago, the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that most medical literature showed late-term abortions weren't sought because of "maternal health complications or lethal fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancy" despite what we are incessantly told by activists. A pro-choice Guttmacher Institute study similarly found that most late-term abortions were not "for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment." (As far as I can tell, they're no longer conducting inquiries into this inconvenient matter.)

It is difficult — purposefully so, one imagines — to calculate how many viable babies are aborted every year. It is probably around 1.3% of the total. Which is to say thousands, perhaps over 8,000, viable babies are killed every year; most, if not all, having nothing to do with "saving the mother's life." (There's no law anywhere in the country that bars a doctor from protecting the life of the mother.) There are far more healthy babies terminated than school shooting victims every year. And Democrats want to enshrine the practice into law.

Of course, sometimes these decisions are often fraught with complicated ethical questions. No one should diminish this reality. It's not the pro-lifer who treats the issue frivolously.

Two, Democrats want to go way beyond codifying Roe. The Women's Health Protection Act, for instance, would not only have made it impossible to enforce any fetal viability limits, but it would have unconstitutionally overturned hundreds of existing state laws, including ones banning sex-selective abortions, protecting conscientious objectors, upholding parental or guardian notification for minors, and many others.

On abortion, there is only one extremist on the ballot.

(COMMENT, BELOW)


Previously:
07/13/24: Explain Yourself, Kamala Harris!
07/05/24: How Biden's Mental Decline Went From 'Misinformation' to Fact in a Week
04/12/24: Biden Is Now Chasing the 'Death to America' Voter
03/15/24: Turns Out Biden Lied About Hur, Beau, And Why He Pilfered Classified Docs
02/09/24: Why Biden Is Threatening to Veto Aid to Israel
02/09/23: Electric Cars Are a Scam
06/30/23: Americans Have Never Been Less Threatened by 'Extreme Weather'
03/03/23: Questioning Biden's Ukraine Policy Doesn't Make You an 'Isolationist'
01/20/23: No ribbons? Don't hide behind religion!
01/13/23: On Classified Documents, Joe Biden Is Out of Excuses
04/29/22: Biden's Ministry of Truth
04/08/22: The Most Radical Abortion Law in the Nation
04/01/22: Recuse Yourself, Joe Biden
03/25/22: No, School Boards Are Not 'Banning Books'
03/11/22: Let Them Drive Teslas
01/28/22: It's Not Government's Job to 'Root Out' Misinformation
01/14/22: Biden's Big Elections Lie
01/07/22: Schumer's Ugly 'Voting Rights' Gamble
12/24/21:AOC's Grasp on American Governance Is a 'Farce'
12/17/21: Dems Pivot from Build Back Better to Useless Extremism
11/19/21: Reckoning' Over Steele Dossier?
10/15/21: The Biden White House Will Pay for Playing Inflation Games
09/24/21: The most demonstrable political scandal still ignored
09/17/21: Sorry, AOC, The Rich Already Pay Their Fair Share
09/02/21: Why Isn't Biden to Blame for COVID-19 Deaths?
08/06/21: Biden's Unprecedented Attack on the Constitution
07/30/21: Jan. 6 Was Deplorable. It Was NOT a Coup
06/21/21: The Myth of Republican Obstructionism
05/21/21: What Does Putin Have on Biden?
04/16/21: Kristen Clarke Is Unfit to Be in Government
03/26/21: No to DC Statehood is far from GOP being reflexive
03/22/21: Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due Process Rights The Hypocrisy of the Filibuster Busters
03/12/21: Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due Process Rights
03/05/21: AOC's Terrible Minimum Wage Argument
02/12/21: The Dem Party Is Radicalizing against the Constitution
02/05/21: What NOT to Do with Marjorie Taylor Greene
01/15/21: Free Speech Is a Value Not Just a Right
12/31/20: It Can't Get Any Worse Than 2020. Here's a 2021 Political Wish List
10/26/20: Wanted: An Honest Debate about the Death Penalty
10/26/20: These are the questions 'Big Guy' Biden must be forced to answer about Hunter's emails
09/11/20: The Dems' Dangerous Delegitimization of the Election
08/28/20: Biden Is Underperforming Hillary in Battleground States
08/14/20: Kamala Harris, Imaginary Centrist
07/24/20: Who you calling a fascist?
07/17/20: Speech Police have finally gone too far
07/03/20: 'But Gorsuch' Is Still Trump's Best Argument
06/22/20: Welcome to America's Cultural Revolution
06/12/20: The color of my skin is not an indictment of my morality, nor does it strip me of my agency
06/05/20: What this son of immigrants knows about bulding bussinesses --- and the dismay of destruction
05/28/20: The Folly of Twitter's Fact-Check
05/22/20: Dems Warning Trump Will Reject Election Results Should Look in the Mirror
05/15/20: Obamagate Is NOT a Conspiracy Theory
05/08/20: Really, Joe --- due process is the opposite of justice?