Republicans' Farthermost Ballgame Rhetoric Isn't Just Incorrect, It'southward Dangerous

Scott Walker follows Trump'due south pb at CPAC. Photo: AARON P. BERNSTEIN/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Scott Walker may not be a governor anymore, but Wisconsin'south sometime principal executive notwithstanding knows how to make headlines. In an advent at CPAC on Thursday, Walker reportedly fabricated a bizarre merits about ballgame:

It should go without saying, only in case anyone's confused — nobody is taking babies domicile from the hospital to "abort" them at home. But every bit foreign every bit Walker's statement is, it'southward non without precedent. Abortion opponents accept made hyperbolic, frequently inaccurate claims about the process for years, sometimes with vehement consequences. And Walker is probably following his president's example. Trump made similar claims on Twitter and in his State of the Union address:

Trump and Walker announced to exist responding to the contempo demise of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. Introduced past Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, the bill would enforce criminal penalties for whatever abortion provider that failed to give medical intendance to an infant built-in during an abortion process. On Monday, Democrats blocked the bill from making it to the flooring for a vote. Since so, Republicans take made the media rounds to accuse Democrats of beingness would-exist babe killers. They reacted similarly to recent abortion bills proposed in the New York and Virginia legislatures. New York's Reproductive Health Deed, which Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law back in Jan, allows abortion after the 24th week of pregnancy if the fetus isn't viable or the pregnancy risks a woman's health. In Virginia, companion bills introduced in both chambers of the state legislature would take immune a unmarried physician to sign off on a second- or 3rd-term ballgame if a woman's physical or mental health is at risk. Nether current law, three physicians have to agree that a second- or tertiary-term abortion is necessary before a patient can receive i. Information technology would non, every bit some Republicans in state and national offices suggested at the time, have immune physicians to arrest a baby merely before it crowned. Nor did Virginia's governor, Ralph Northam, actually suggest the killing of babies after birth when he spoke in defense of the nib.

Second- or tertiary-term abortion procedures do non typically result in live birth — and even if that does happen, information technology'southward however illegal to "execute" infants. When an abortion is performed late in pregnancy, it's overwhelmingly because a woman's health or life is at chance or because the fetus has severe deformities, similar anencephaly, that are incompatible with life. Northam referred to cases where a adult female chooses to give nativity knowing that the baby volition be terminally ill. It's palliative intendance, not an execution. (Northam'south real issues, it turns out, have naught to do with his abortion politics.)

Different factions within the anti-abortion movement prefer dissimilar rhetorical approaches, but hyperbole isn't a new tactic. It's relatively common for pro-life activists or groups to link abortion to infanticide, or to refer to the procedure itself as infanticide in all cases. Some activists get even further, and speak of an abortion "holocaust." Walker and Trump have taken the infanticide merits to new extremes, but their words are rooted, still, in the movement's central premise: that ballgame murders a human.

And that language has consequences. Abortion providers are frequently targeted by domestic terrorists who have become convinced that America has an infant murder problem. Robert Honey, who murdered three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood in 2016, direct cited right-fly, anti-abortion material online and on radio shows as an influence. By the time Kansas abortion provider George Tiller was murdered in 2010, anti-abortion extremists had already bombed his clinic and shot him in both arms. In court, his killer complained of babies "torn limb from limb," a common claim in the pro-life movement.

It'due south not yet clear if the Trump assistants's hostile posture toward abortion rights has emboldened anti-abortion extremists the way it appears to have emboldened violent white nationalists. Merely there are contempo examples of threats or actual attempts of violence directed at abortion providers. In 2018, a West Virginia homo was arrested for threatening to impale Planned Parenthood employees in Pittsburgh, whom he blamed for "murdering" his child. The same year, an Indiana man pleaded guilty to emailing threats to local ballgame clinics. "I will do what I experience is necessary to protect the innocent and stop these atrocities y'all commit," he wrote, according to the Riverfront Times. In February of this year, CNN reported that the FBI had begun investigating a fire gear up at a Missouri Planned Parenthood as a potential hate crime. And on Wed, Texas police arrested a 17-twelvemonth-old for threatening "jihad" on abortion clinics.

The Republican Political party may well energize its base with its false infanticide claims. They may also put abortion providers in real danger.

The GOP's Farthermost Abortion Rhetoric Is Wrong, and Dangerous