Vice President Mike Pence may not go in for grabbing women’s private parts like his boss, but he nonetheless has a résumé brimful of efforts to control women’s reproductive organs and sexuality. It’s no surprise that in a Tuesday get-together with one of the nation’s more prominent forced-birther groups, he made a prediction designed to please the crowd:
Campaign Action
Standing before a roomful of anti-abortion activists in Nashville on Tuesday, Mike Pence described the “great progress” made under President Donald Trump to limit women’s access to legal abortions in the U.S. and abroad.
He called for the activists in the room to work ever harder to help “restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.” He then made a stunning suggestion: that legal abortion could “once again” be banned in the U.S., and that it could happen “in our time.”
Speaking at a luncheon hosted by the Susan B. Anthony List and Life Institute, an anti-abortion group, the vice president announced that “life is winning in America once again,” before ticking off the many policies enacted under Trump aimed at limiting access to abortions.
The forced-birther movement has proved itself quite adept at telling boatloads of lies in the cause of controlling women. It has even managed to get government funding in several states to support phony crisis pregnancy centers that have institutionalized this lying.
But the twisted notion that ending legal abortion will end all abortion is arguably the worst lie of all.
Because abortion has been practiced for millennia and will continue to be no matter if it’s forbidden. With legal abortion gone, safe abortion will go too, at least for women not affluent enough to fly where the procedure remains legal. And, even in an era when one-third or more of abortions are accomplished with a couple of pills, “back alley” blackmarket abortions will again kill women.
You can bet that the crowd that wants zygotes to be recognized as full human beings worthy of the same protections as actually born persons and who flaunt photos of aborted fetuses at their clinic protests won’t be distributing leaflets with photos of women who have bled to death after botched abortions. That’s because “pro-life” isn’t an all-embracing humanitarian principle with them. It’s a brand name for authoritarian, male supremacist, ideological control. If these ideologues have any heroes, it’s the leaders depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Resistance and rebellion are the proper response to the lies of Mike Pence and all the forced birthers.