Mehmet Oz, the television snake oil huckster and Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, has had what you might call a devolution in his thinking on abortion. He’s gone from approaching the issue as a medical practitioner to a typical Republican, telling his audience whatever he thinks they want to hear. In the case of a tele-town hall audience earlier this year, it’s the most extreme message: life begins at conception.
The Daily Beast obtained audio of a campaign event in May, a week before the Republican primary, in which he told voters he believed that abortion is “still murder” from the moment the sperm enters the egg. “I do believe life starts at conception, and I’ve said that multiple times,” he told the audience. “If life starts at conception,” Oz added, “why do you care what age the heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder, if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.”
That question came up from an attendee about Oz’s previous life as a TV doctor in 2019, when he opined about the arbitrary six-week bans in a Breakfast Club interview. “If you’re going to define life by a beating heart,” he said in 2019, “then make it a beating heart, not little electrical exchanges in the cell that no one would hear or think about as a heart.” Oz also said that he was “really worried” about the harmful health effects if federal abortion protections were overturned by the Supreme Court.
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Oz in his capacity as a physician, the 2019 version of Oz, sounded pretty pro-choice in that interview. “Just being logical about it,” Oz said then, “if you think that the moment of conception you’ve got a life, then why would you even wait six weeks? Right, then an in vitro fertilized egg is still a life.”
Which is apparently what 2022 Oz believes: Life begins at conception and it’s murder no matter what. Or at least that’s what May 2022 Oz said he believed. Now that it’s general election time and he’s not chasing the MAGAiest of the MAGAs for votes, Oz seems to think that maybe abortion is not always murder.
In a town hall meeting this week, Oz found some exceptions to his “100% pro-life” abortion-is-always-murder position: the health of the mother, rape, and incest. That’s a variation on the gaslighting forced birth proponents trotted out when various horror stories about abortion bans started emerging.
Like about the 10-year-old rape survivor who had to travel out of Ohio to obtain an abortion. Or people having miscarriages, or people whose lives are threatened by ectopic pregnancies. Those don’t really count as abortions, they have tried to insist. Terminating those kind of pregnancies, Catherine Glenn Foster, the head of Americans United for Life, testified would fall under any exception and would not be an abortion.
The Oz who was a doctor knows that’s bullshit. Abortion is abortion and it is a safe and essential medical treatment for millions. It is necessary for all kinds of reasons that are nobody’s business other than the person needing an abortion and whomever they wish to involve. No matter how the pregnancy occurred.
“I trust democracy,” Oz said this week in that town hall, trying to change the subject. “I trust your ability to influence our representatives in Harrisburg, which is where this decision should be made. It’s not talked about in the Constitution.”
But if he’s elected to the Senate, and if there’s a Republican majority, he’s going to have to be held accountable on this. Because there will be a Republican bill to create a federal abortion ban and he’ll have to take a position.
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