After 25 white men in the Alabama state Senate approved a bill outlawing nearly all abortion in the state, which was subsequently signed into law with by Gov. Kay Ivey (R), some prominent Republicans have sought to distance themselves from the legislation, which is far to the right of where polling indicates most Americans stand on the issue.
But many of these Republicans now seeking political shelter sang a much tougher tune on outlawing abortion when the end of Roe v. Wade wasn’t such a real possibility.
Take Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for example: In an interview Sunday, he said he didn’t support the Alabama law and called a separate bill in Missouri — a so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill that would ban abortion after eight weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest — “extreme”
But in 2007, when he running for the GOP presidential nomination and eager to shed perception as a liberal Republican from Massachusetts, Romney took quite a different stance in a debate. Asked about the potential for a federal ban on all abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned, Romney said that while unlikely, “it would be wonderful” if the national consensus allowed for such a bill in Congress.
“I would welcome a circumstance where there was such a consensus in this country that we said, we don’t want to have abortion in this country at all, period,” he said. Pressed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Romney added: “I’d be delighted to sign that bill.” Then again, Romney has taken multiple public stances on abortion over his political career.
Romney’s niece, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said Friday that, “personally, I would have the exceptions” for legal abortions in cases of rape and incest — not present in the Alabama bill — in addition to cases in which a pregnant woman’s life is in danger.
But just five years ago, when she was campaigning to become the Michigan GOP’s representative on the Republican National Committee, McDaniel responded to a written questionnaire from the group “Grassroots in Michigan,” which asked what exceptions she would want, if any, in anti-abortion laws.
“Exception for Life of the mother,” she responded, making no mention of exceptions for rape or incest. A year later, she became chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party. A year after that, she took over leadership of the Republican National Committee.
After she was elected RNC chair, the anti-abortion site LifeNews.com reported in an article this past January that McDaniel claimed she would not change the Republican platform on abortion, which makes no mention of exceptions for rape or incest.
The GOP platform does endorse a federal version of an abortion ban after 20 weeks, the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which makes certain exceptions for rape, incest and the lives of pregnant women. But the same platform also calls for “a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) markets himself as part of the Senate’s far right, so it was notable when he implied in an interview Sunday that he accepted that states should be able to craft individual abortion legislation, even if the laws are more pro-choice than he’d like.
“Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd noted that Cotton personally believes that “life does begin at conception.” How then, Todd asked, “do you justify an exception for rape and incest?”
Because, Cotton answered, “we live in a democratic society. I recognize not everyone shares my views or the views of the vast majority of Americans or of Arkansans.” Pointing to New York and Virginia, he said that “states are going to make different decisions.”
Setting aside that most Americans don’t agree, even in a recent poll touted by anti-abortion outlets, that “life” begins when a sperm meets egg, Cotton’s own record contradicts his comment Sunday that states should have the ability to craft their own abortion access laws.
As Todd pointed out Sunday, in 2014 Cotton became a cosponsor in 2014 of the “Life at Conception Act,” which declared that “each born and preborn human person,” beginning at fertilization, should have 14th Amendment protections.
And in 2012, when he was running for Congress, Cotton also said he supported the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004, which makes it a crime to injure or kill a fetus in the course of other violent offenses. Though the law’s last page makes an exception for abortion, it defines an “unborn child” as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.”
In fact, Cotton at the time portrayed his support for the law as indicative of his support for nationwide anti-abortion laws.
“We must re-establish a culture of life in America that reflects the value of every life from conception through birth, life, and death,” his 2012 House campaign website said, according to OnTheIssues. “I am pro-life and I will always vote that way in Congress. I believe Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey were wrongly decided. I oppose taxpayer funding of abortion. I also support measures like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act.”
Here’s the real reason these sickos are backing off of the AL ban, which includes no exception for rape, incest or life of the mother…These Goopers know they still have to attract a fair number of women to vote for tRump, and manipulating the voter rolls, as it relates to women, is a lot harder than merely purging Hispanic names and African Americans, even with Russia’s help the second time around. It doesn’t mean they won’t try but so far using novel ways to find hyphens and other typos in maiden names hasn’t really been as effective as their other voter suppression and nullification methods. Therefore, they must realize they can’t go out of their way to piss off every woman in America with this shit. And those Evangelical women won’t net them nearly enough votes in a general election, especially when we women show up en masse and cast our ballot…which we will…guaranteed. Four years of this asshole will have been more than enough of an insult to our gender. The Perpetrator in Chief won’t have a fucking chance at re-election when we show up, and neither will the rest of his party when the female vote comes out to send a clear message about the direction of this country and where we want it to go. tRump and the GOP have sent women’s rights back at least 30 years. Time to put an end to this tRump glorified patriarchal nightmare.
There’s this thought at the back of my head that these bills might be the best thing that ever happened to choice. Repubs loved abortion politics because it got them elected. Very few of them actually want abortion made illegal. As long as the culture war could be stirred up every four years, and then paid lip service to the rest of the time, it was a boon to the GOP.
However, now it is very likely that one of these bills will make it to SCOTUS, where there are two possible outcomes: 1) Roberts understands the magnitude of the shit bomb he’s been handed, and he votes with the liberals, putting this to rest for a generation, or 2) he votes with the conservatives and the GOP writes their anti-woman, anti-progress, draconian evil into stone for a generation, and every red state that writes this crap into law feels what a true boycott really feels like.
Hang this around their necks like an albatross. That should be easy in the case of Cotton, except folks would have trouble telling which was which, where one begun and the other ended.
If you accept that an unborn fetus has the same right to life as any human being and you agree with the above statement, what logic would you construct to prevent a mother from legally being able to kill her grown child who was later discovered to have been fathered by an immediate relative?
I coined the term a while back, but for different matters (ahem: trump): Post-Full-Term Abortion.