The lies of American abortion activists

(& other stories)

Greetings everyone,

A few columns for you this week. From The Bridgehead:

The toxic “feminist masculinity” of Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff

Melania Trump champions abortion throughout all nine months

Danielle Smith delivers on promise to protect gender-confused children in Alberta

My essay in The European Conservative this week:

Moloch’s Web of Lies

Abortion has been a factor in every American presidential election since 1980, but the 2024 race is the abortion election. Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have both have cast votes that de facto endorse infanticide. Abortion is central to their campaign. Harris became the first candidate to visit an abortion clinic (I wonder if any babies died while she was touring the facility) and abortion was the main topic onstage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—during which a mobile abortion clinic was set up and celebrated for literally ending unborn lives outside.

Indeed, abortion is one of the few subjects Harris is truly passionate about. She comes alive when she speaks about it; she boasts that her grandmother used to go from village to village preaching the gospel of abortion back in India; she launched a 50-stop “reproductive rights” bus tour; she speaks about it incessantly. Indeed, Harris has promised that if elected, she will eliminate the filibuster to ensure that Roe v. Wade can be enshrined in federal law. With the filibuster gone, Harris could also implement Biden’s plan to transform the U.S. Supreme Court to remove one of the last bulwarks against their radical social agenda. Every American norm can be trashed not only to bring back Moloch, but to give him more power than before.

With Donald Trump backing away from the abortion issue, it has been incredibly difficult for the pro-life movement to counter the blinding barrage of propaganda. Pro-life groups are being outspent by staggering margins in every state-level referendum as Planned Parenthood and progressive megadonors open up their war chests. Worse, the mainstream press has been doing everything in their power to assist them. Every week, the American public is saturated with abortion stories published by the press and amplified by progressive politicians and public figures that are overt lies. In many cases, the media narrative is the precise opposite of the truth.

On September 23, for example, CNN ran a long-form story titled, “She was accused of murder after losing her pregnancy. SC woman now tells her story.” The narrative that women were being locked up for having miscarriages promptly went viral, thanks to being pushed hard by Democrats and their allies. The international press then picked up the story (The Independent’s headline read: “A college student lost her pregnancy. Then she was accused of homicide.”) But the narrative was completely false—and the press knew it. Amari Marsh, the woman in question, did not have a miscarriage. She gave birth to a live, premature daughter into a toilet. She then called 911.

The emergency dispatcher repeatedly told Marsh to take the little girl out of the toilet, but she did not. According to Marsh, although she’d had the presence of mind to call 911, she couldn’t rescue her daughter because she “couldn’t even keep [herself] together.” The infant still showed signs of life when the medical responders arrived, and they tried to save her. Sadly, she did not survive. Marsh was arrested for not taking her daughter out of the toilet when the dispatcher repeatedly urged her to do so, with the warrant stating that her refusal was “a proximate cause of her daughter’s death.” The case was dropped when a grand jury decided that there was no probable cause to proceed with a criminal trial. The case, in short, had nothing to do with pro-life laws—although it is apropos that abortion activists would fail to distinguish between an infanticide allegation and abortion.

CNN’s entire story portrays Marsh’s ordeal as a story about pro-life laws and why the restoration of “abortion rights” is so essential. But only in paragraph 35 does CNN finally admit that the story has nothing to do with abortion: “Solicitor David Pascoe, a Democrat elected to South Carolina’s 1st Judicial Circuit whose office handled Marsh’s prosecution, said the issues of abortion and reproductive rights weren’t relevant to this case.” The media gave the politicians the narrative; they pushed it; the media followed up by reporting on their comments and public reaction. It’s a feedback loop so airtight the truth barely has a chance—and these are the people who are “fact-checking” pro-life advocates.

The media has also been falsely claiming that women are dying because of pro-life laws. It seems to be a closely guarded secret that it is legal, in every single state in America, to get life-saving interventions, miscarriage care, or any other form of healthcare that a woman might require (abortion, contrary to Planned Parenthood’s claims, is not healthcare). In fact, the disinformation that Democrats and abortion activists are spreading, by consistently claiming that this is not the case, is genuinely dangerous. But even when women die from legal abortion using a dangerous method that pro-life advocates have warned against, the press claims that pro-life laws are at fault. This is gaslighting at its finest.

Consider the recent case of Georgia woman Amber Thurman. Thurman died when the abortion pills, which she took to abort her twins at nine weeks gestation, failed to produce a complete abortion. As a result, she became septic, which is a risk listed on the abortion pill’s black box warning. Thurman went to the hospital, but doctors decided not to intervene immediately and remove the infected fetal remains from her body via a dilatation and curettage (D&C) procedure, despite the fact that such a procedure is specifically permitted by state law, because both babies were already dead.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell claimed that D&C procedures are illegal in Georgia. That claim is categorically false—such a procedure is only illegal when used to dismember a live child in the womb. Thurman’s babies had already been legally killed. The Daily Beast made a similar false claim. What actually happened is that a woman tragically died due to a known side effect—printed on the box—of a dangerous abortion drug. The narrative pushed by the press is that Thurman died because of laws protecting unborn children. A second, similar case, in which a woman named Candi Miller died after taking abortion pills that she had ordered online, was presented in the same way. Even the ugly consequences of “do-it-yourself,” at-home abortions, for which the Democrats have been zealously advocating, are passed off as the fault of the very pro-life activists who warned about the dangerous side effects.

American abortion activists are using the same playbook that was used in Ireland, Malta, and elsewhere: they incessantly claim that restricting abortion results in women dying, and so persuade the middle majority that pro-life laws are anything but. In Ireland, abortion activists used the death of Savita Halappanavar from septicemia to falsely claim that a repeal of the pro-life 8th Amendment was necessary to prevent similar tragedies, resulting in a vote to repeal the 8th in 2018. In Malta, abortion activists tried the same tactic, although a magnificent campaign by Maltese pro-lifers managed to defeat the proposed abortion law. Despite the fact that pro-life countries like Poland, Malta, Chile, and Ireland pre-2018 had better maternal health outcomes than abortion regimes, abortion activists successfully drowned out these facts in a roar of lies.

Thus the cruelty of Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and their abortion industry pals is not only covered up by the press—they are actively portrayed as compassionate do-gooders fighting to save the lives of women. It is no wonder that pro-life activists are getting badly beaten in state-level referendums. Their opponents are getting countless millions in free advertising from the mainstream media, which constantly publishes politically potent deceits that sway people of good will against the pro-life cause. The average voter can be forgiven for believing that women are getting charged with murder for miscarriages and dying after being denied care, without ever realizing that these stories are actually about a live baby girl drowning in a toilet and women dying after taking the very abortion ‘medication’ that Democrats remorselessly champion.

***

Finally, this week’s Bridgehead Briefing: