Democrats don’t want abortions at 9 months, but Republicans are LITERALLY killing women with their abortion bans.
Trump is "proud" to make this happen
During Fox News’ campaign commercial for Donald Trump masquerading as a Town Hall on Wednesday night, Trump again bragged that he overturned Roe v. Wade, declaring, "For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it and I'm proud to have done it.”
This is not the first time Trump has boasted about ending this constitutional right for women, stating last year, “I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade, and everybody said that was an impossible thing to do” and “I was able to terminate Roe v. Wade after 50 years of trying,” adding he was “honored” to do so.
That’s all true—Trump is 100 percent the reason Roe was overturned. But from there, Trump claimed that Democrats want to kill babies after they are born. (That, of course, would be murder.) With no push back from the hosts of the Fox News Trump infomercial, Trump told the audience that Democrats “are willing to kill the baby in eight months, nine months, or even after birth.”
Here, Trump is lying. Democrats are not championing abortion until the final weeks of pregnancy—unless to save the life of the woman. But Republican abortion bans are literally killing women—and the GOP is 100 percent on board with that.
Beyond that, the GOP abortion bans that do provide ambiguously defined exceptions for “emergencies” are cruelly forcing women to suffer for extended periods of time before a doctor will perform an abortion given they fear going to jail if they don’t wait until the woman is on the doorstep of death.
For starters, even when Roe was law, the constitutional right to an abortion only extended until the viability of the fetus—which was typically about 24 weeks into the pregnancy. After that time, states were permitted to enact legislation that restricted abortion access. For example, even in the very Blue state of New York, the current law provides an “unqualified right to abortion up to 24 weeks.” After that, abortion is only permitted if the fetus is not viable or if the pregnant person’s life or health is at risk.
In reality—a place Republicans never visit--when Roe was law, more than 98 percent of abortions took place in the first three months of pregnancy—as the CDC has documented. Only about 1.2 percent of abortions took place after the 20 week period. In those later abortions, the primary reasons were fetal anomalies and health risk to the pregnant person.
For example, many structural fetal anomalies—such as organ development—are not discoverable until 20 weeks into a pregnancy. These types of medical conditions often mean the “fetus will almost certainly die before or shortly after birth” prompting a woman to have an abortion rather than carry a dead fetus or one that will not survive.
Then there are health risks to women. As the Kaiser Foundation detailed, there are various “Life threatening conditions may also develop later in pregnancy,” including “intrauterine infection (chorioamnionitis) often in conjunction with premature rupture of the amniotic sac” or newly diagnosed cancer requiring prompt treatment.
Those are the primary reasons why the one percent of pregnancies were aborted later in the gestational period. And Trump and the GOP know this. They lie to justify their laws forcing women to carry a fetus to term against their will.
The GOP also knows that their abortion bans—that bar abortion at conception in 14 states including in the case of rape--are literally killing women. The U.S. rate for women dying during pregnancy--even when Roe was law--was already more than ten times the estimated rates of some other high income countries, including Australia, Austria, Japan and Spain. For Black women—as the CDC has detailed—it’s far more deadly, noting that: "Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women.” Thus, by forcing more women to carry a fetus to term, the GOP is causing more women to die during pregnancy.
And a new report from the Gender Equity Policy provides even more support, finding that “women in states with abortion bans are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth.” Again, facts the GOP knows about but to them a six-week-old fetus that is the size of a grain of rice is more valued than a full-grown woman.
When the GOP is not killing women, their abortion bans are making them barbarically suffer. In general, the GOP abortion bans only allow an abortion when there is a “medical emergency.” But given Republicans have intentionally left that term ambiguous, there are numerous examples of doctors delaying or denying abortion care rather than risk up to life in prison and the loss of their license. The real-world impact is that the women are forced to beg for their lives as they suffer painful and life-threatening medical complications.
For example, in Tennessee, Mayron Hollis discovered she was pregnant in spring 2022, however, her doctor informed her that the pregnancy could be fatal to both her and her fetus. Given this news, Hollis scheduled an abortion. However, after Tennessee’s abortion ban took effect on Aug. 25, 2022, Hollis learned her abortion had been canceled. She was, thus, forced by GOP law to carry the fetus to term against her will. Then, 25 weeks into her forced pregnancy, Hollis began bleeding uncontrollably, lapsing in and out of consciousness. Her daughter Elayna was born 14 weeks premature and still struggles with an array of health problems. Hollis required a hysterectomy.
And there’s the recent headline grabbing case of Kate Cox, a 31-year-old Dallas-area mother of two. After learning the fetus she was carrying had a chromosomal abnormality that’s almost always fatal before birth or soon after, she wanted an abortion.
Before Roe was overturned, Texas law allowed doctors to terminate pregnancies due to lethal fetal anomalies at any point during the pregnancy but now Cox’s doctors said their hands were tied by Texas’ abortion laws which prohibit abortion except to save the life of the pregnant patient. This was true even though Cox was “at high risk for multiple pregnancy complications including hypertension, gestational diabetes and infection,” and she had to visit an emergency room for a fourth time in a week “for pregnancy symptoms including severe cramps leaking fluid and elevated vital signs.”
But still the Texas GOP and their courts refused to allow Cox to have an abortion—instead forcing her to carry a fetus that could kill her. Cox—in order to save her life—was forced to travel to another state for an abortion.
These two stories are just the tip of the iceberg of cases where the GOP has cruelly forced women against their will to carry a fetus to term, even when it was killing them. The GOP is not only denying abortions, but also barring lifesaving healthcare for women.
Democrats are standing up for both a women’s fundamental right to control her own destiny –as well as ensuring women have the healthcare they need. In contrast, the GOP is killing women—literally. And the GOP’s leader Donald Trump is “proud” to have made this all possible.
1. No sane, otherwise-healthy, uncoerced woman has ever woken up after eight months of an otherwise-normal pregnancy and decided “screw it, let’s get rid of it.“ None. Ever.
2. On those unfortunate occasions when the health of either the mother or the fetus requires a late-term pregnancy to be terminated, you don’t “abort“ the fetus, you *deliver* it.
How the Republicans continue to get away with this bullshit is a complete mystery to me.🤔😉😊
Republicans don't care. That becomes more and more obvious by the day. And until it costs them electorally in the reddest of states they will continue not to care. But imagine a world in which this issue takes out Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton. That would get their attention in a big way. Women, and the men who love them, have the power to deal with Republican cruelty. It's our duty to step up and do it.