Blake Masters is feeling the heat on abortion. The Arizona Republican Senate nominee is frantically backing away from his very well-documented positions and trying to portray Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly as the extreme one.
Masters has dramatically scrubbed his campaign website’s abortion policy page, as if someone wasn’t going to be right there with screenshots of the stuff he took out. NBC News has the goods. For example, Masters’ website no longer says, “I am 100% pro-life.” It no longer describes his support for “a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed” or for “the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which criminalizes abortion after 20 weeks, or “the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, the SAVE Moms and Babies Act, and other pro-life legislation.”
Instead, the website says Masters supports “a law or a Constitutional amendment that bans late term (third trimester) abortion and partial-birth abortion at the federal level” and “pro-life legislation, pregnancy centers, and programs that make it easier for pregnant women to support a family and decide to choose life.” Personhood laws define a newly fertilized egg as a human being, so moving to claiming he just wants to ban third-trimester abortion is … kind of a change.
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“Strip taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood, all other abortionists, and any organization that promotes abortion” has become “Strip taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood,” and “Remove funding for any research that uses embryonic stem cells of aborted fetal remains” is entirely gone from Masters’ website.
This is a wholesale revision of who Blake Masters is, and the website is just the beginning. He also released a web video in which he tries to look calm and laid back and keep his hand movements smooth and non-angry while children play around him as he claims, “Mark Kelly votes for the most extreme abortion laws in the world.”
The guy whose stated views on abortion include “It’s a religious sacrifice to these people; I think it’s demonic” and “you make it illegal and you punish the doctors” is trying to paint as extreme a guy whose position is basically that the protections of Roe v. Wade should be restored. Masters wouldn’t be convincing on this point even if his current set of positions hadn’t emerged, and his old positions been banished, literally today.
As it is, what Masters has shown is not that he has very popular, moderate views on abortion. He’s shown that he’s a giant flaming liar. And—and this part is nice—he’s shown that he knows he’s losing and that his extreme positions on abortion are part of what’s dragging him down.
