On Abortion, Kamala Harris Is the Extremist

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.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
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