Democrats Don’t Know How to Talk About Abortion Either

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 17, 2022

 

During a 2004 “town hall meeting” with U.S. troops in Kuwait, Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld was confronted by a soldier. Prompted by a Tennessee-based reporter, a specialist with the Army’s 278th Regimental Combat Team pressed Rumsfeld to explain why American service personnel were reduced to scavenging for scrap metal to use as armor for his unit’s Humvees. Rumsfeld’s response was thoughtful and honest, but no one remembers it. What they do remember is the terse soundbite to which his answer was reduced: “You go to war with the army you have.”

 

Democrats rode into the 2022 midterm election year in an especially vulnerable Humvee. What they had was the deus ex machina of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, so they went with it. Gratuitously. “From rural Wisconsin Trump country to California’s heavily Catholic Central Valley,” Politico reported at the beginning of October, “there’s almost no place where Democrats think an abortion rights-focused message won’t play.” Democrats pushed all their chips in on the notion that Republicans’ views on abortion are out of step with those of the American people. The move rested on the assumption that Democrats’ approach to the issue was unassailable.

 

And that dubious assumption is being put to the test. In interview after interview, Democrats in contested races are neutralizing the GOP’s disadvantages on abortion by exposing their own views on the subject.

 

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, for example, has accused Republicans of setting “arbitrary, politically-defined timelines” on abortion. But when she elaborated on her views before a friendly audience, the candidate outlined a vast conspiracy theory.

 

“There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks,” Abrams said, surrounded by dutifully nodding supporters. “It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body away from her.” Such is the left’s commitment to medical science that Planned Parenthood immediately scrubbed its website of its reference to the “very basic beating heart and circulatory system” that forms in a six-week-old fetus. In its place, the advocacy group insisted that an embryo’s “cardiac activity” can “sound like a heartbeat on an ultrasound,” but it’s not a fully formed heart. Which is just a longer way of saying “very basic beating heart.”

 

Another candidate running statewide in Georgia, Sen. Raphael Warnock, exposed his own immoderation on abortion during last week’s senatorial debate. When asked if there should be “any limits on abortion,” Warnock issued a practiced reply. “A patient’s room is too small a place for a woman, her doctor, and the U.S. government,” he said. “I have a profound reverence for life and a deep respect for choice.” The self-described “pro-choice pastor” has said this before, as the debate moderators noted.

 

“Even God gave us a choice,” Warnock once told a group of rally attendees. “It is apparent that God has given us a range of choices.” Someone as theologically astute as the senator surely understands that God provisioned man with free will so he might choose righteousness freely. This is not a judgment-free proposition. In a state where nearly eight-in-ten residents attend church with some regularity, the senator’s reverence of choice for choice’s sake is likely to land with a discordant thud.

 

Watching Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs bob and weave her way out of a direct answer on abortion limits is simultaneously impressive and painful. Hobbs was asked no less than five times in a two-minute stretch what she thinks the legal limits on elective abortion should be, but she never gave a straight answer. When her interlocutor, CNN’s Dana Bash, simply assumed that her position was that there should be “absolutely no limits in any point of the pregnancy on abortion,” Hobbs once again let loose a blizzard of rhetoric that didn’t answer the question. So, by default, CNN has written Hobbs’s abortion policy, and it’s as or more extreme than the most doctrinaire pro-life policy.

 

By and large, Democratic candidates have settled on a consensus view that abortion should be left to a woman and her health care provider. But this disinterest in the outcomes that this produces disappears when Democrats are made to talk about abortion at any length. In many races across the country, voters have been robbed of the chance to ratify the pre-Dobbs status quo. It turns out that neither party’s activist class was satisfied with Roe, all the Democratic Party’s rhetoric to that effect notwithstanding. Thus, the party is transforming what it wants to be a referendum on abortion into a choice between two competing radicalisms.

 

In 2019, the New York Times put its finger on the pulse of the progressive movement and found that the activist class wasn’t content to defend abortion rights. “They want to go on offense.” You’d think three years would be enough time to formulate an offensive strategy.