Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for the open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, said during his debate with Democratic nominee John Fetterman on Tuesday night that he would not vote for any federal abortion legislation, be it restrictive or permissive.
“I am not gonna support federal — federal rules that block the ability of states to do what they wish to do. The abortion decision should be left up to states,” declared Oz. When asked whether he would vote for Senator Lindsay Graham’s bill setting a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks, Oz doubled down on the answer.
“Any bill that violates what I said — which is the federal government interfering with the state rule on abortion — I would vote against,” he said.
Nevertheless, pro-abortion pundits — and I use pro-abortion instead of pro-choice only because the following offenders are so devoted to the procedure that they’re willing to lie in service of it — have attempted to twist Oz’s words.
Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, for example, claimed that Oz was “talking about people in the Water Management District making decisions about life or death, life-or-death decisions on rape, incest, life of the mother.” In another instance, he asserted that Oz wanted “Parks and Recreation people” making those decisions.
The basis of Scarborough’s claims is a statement from Oz earlier in the debate:
There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions. As a physician, I’ve been in the room when there’s some difficult conversations happening. I don’t want the federal government involved with that at all. I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.
So Oz was not implying that local officials should be making decisions for individual women, but that they — along with women and doctors — should make their voices heard so that their views are represented in state law. The question that elicited that answer, by the way, granted that Oz personally favors a right to abortion in the cases of rape and incest, as well as when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.
It’s been quite the journey for Scarborough, who voted in favor of federal bans on late-term abortions in Congress and wrote as recently as 2013 that the press should avoid “mindlessly following a left-leaning narrative on abortion that is more interested in promoting political agendas than reporting on political realities.”
He submitted then that “the remarkable advances” in medicine had “moved viability forward” and seemed to endorse “state legislatures like Texas and Wisconsin testing the boundaries of Roe.” Now, he makes his money lazily smearing those who share his old sensibilities in service of a candidate who supports an unrestricted right to abortion through birth.