Democrat Hysteria Over Abortion

By Catholic League president Bill Donohue 

Most Americans are worried about inflation, their life savings, crime, open borders and education. Way down the list of concerns is abortion. But for Democrat leaders, nothing is more important. 

“Hysteria” is the only word that accurately describes what leading Democrats are saying. Why the sky hasn’t fallen is a mystery. Here are some examples. 

On October 17, Vice President Kamala Harris opened her remarks at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles by noting “when I’m traveling around the country, one of the feelings that I hear most is fear. It’s fear.” She later said, “there’s a lot of fear.” 

The fear she was talking about was not the fear of being killed, raped or mugged. Nor was it the fear of families not being able to pay their bills. It was the fear that in some places elected officials have placed restrictions on abortion. 

On October 18, President Biden held a political rally on abortion saying, “Patients are being denied prescriptions that they’ve been taking for years for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, you know, because pharmacies are concerned that those drugs could also be used to terminate a pregnancy so they’re not giving them their prescriptions.” 

No evidence was given. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said after the overturning of Roe v. Wade that “People will die because of this decision.” 

She was not referring to children being killed by abortion but to some hypothetical case involving what she calls pregnant “menstruating people.” 

A new TV ad from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quotes a doctor saying he thought the days of “back-alley abortions” were over. “Too often, women died. I thought those days were long behind us. But not for Mehmet Oz [the Pennsylvania Republican senatorial candidate].” 

Fact Check: According to the CDC, the number of women who died of an illegal abortion in 1972 (the year before Roe) was not some astronomical figure, as pro-abortion activists have alleged. The number was 39. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that “MAGA” Republicans have “pledged to ban abortion in all 50 states and sentence doctors for 5 years in prison.” Similarly, Kamala Harris has said their goal is to criminalize doctors and nurses “with up to five years in prison.” 

This is patently untrue. What some Republicans have said is that healthcare providers who intentionally allow a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion could serve up to 5 years in prison if they failed to attend to the child. The issue is infanticide, not abortion, which apparently makes no difference to these women. 

Rep. Eric Swalwell is running a TV ad showing cops with guns drawn showing up at a house handcuffing a woman in front of her screaming husband and children because she had an unlawful abortion. 

In fact, the only people who are being subjected to SWAT Teams showing up at their homes with guns drawn are pro-life activists. 

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams charged in August that her opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, wants to “investigate and punish women for having miscarriages.”                    

PolitiFact, hardly a right-wing source, said her accusation was completely false. 

To demagogue any issue is despicable, and it is doubly so when the issue is sensitive and divisive. It is a sign of desperation that so many prominent Democrats are distorting, and indeed lying, about abortion, just to get votes.