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Abortion Advocates Show Their True Colors after Roe Reversal

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) gestures outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the court rules in the Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization abortion case overturning Roe v. Wade in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2022. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Elected Democrats and liberal pundits greeted the Dobbs decision with predictable hyperbole and outrage.

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap the progressive reaction to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, criticize a heartless headline on abortion, and hit more media misses.

Abortion Advocates Go Scorched-Earth

For all of their concern about the rise of right-wing violence, certain leftist lawmakers and pundits have once again shown they have no problem using extreme martial language — and, in some cases, explicitly endorsing violence — as long as it furthers their own agenda.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, Democratic rhetoric quickly reached a boiling point.

Representative Jackie Speier (D., Calif.) calls on pro-abortion extremists to “armor up” because “there’s a war out there.”

Former Vox pundit Carlos Maza assured his nearly 160,000 Twitter followers that “Violence is a legitimate and appropriate response to oppression.” 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has argued that restrictions on abortion will “endanger the lives of all women and all birthing people,” ignored a reporter’s questions about whether she would condemn violence proposed by pro-abortion groups: 

The comments come just weeks after police foiled an assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Officers arrested a 26-year-old man who had traveled from California to the justice’s Maryland home, where he was found with a Glock 17 handgun with two magazines and ammunition, a tactical knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a screwdriver, and other gear.

Since the Court released its decision on Friday morning, protests have broken out nationwide. In Los Angeles, pro-abortion protesters reportedly assaulted four police officers with projectiles, fireworks, and a makeshift flamethrower during a “Night of Rage” on Friday. In Portland, Ore., a group of 60 black-clad pro-abortion protesters stormed the city’s Hollywood district “breaking windows and scrawling graffiti,” according to a Portland police report.

Police in Arizona used tear gas to disperse a crowd of rioters who gathered outside the Capitol in downtown Phoenix on Friday to protest the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Arizona state senators were in the middle of voting on a series of bills when protesters “threatened to break the AZ Senate entryway glass,” state Senator Wendy Rogers, a Republican, tweeted.

Rioters damaged multiple state Senate doors and memorials in Wesley Bolin Plaza, Department of Public Safety spokesman Bart Graves told KTAR News. One person was arrested.

On Saturday morning, pro-abortion extremists set a Christian pro-life pregnancy center on fire in Longmont, Colo., and tagged the building with threatening messages. Vandals have targeted dozens of clinics nationwide since the Court’s draft majority opinion was leaked in May.

The list goes on:

Yet the New York Times painted the post-Roe protests as “mostly peaceful” and failed to mention any of the aforementioned examples of violence.

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested that it is actually the reasoning of the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that is violent.

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer argued that the Court “now largely functions as a mechanism for turning right wing culture war grievances into law, and the reason other constitutional rights are not safe is there will always be a new conservative grudge to be remedied by judicial fiat.”

As NR’s Nate Hochman replied, “Overturning Roe has been the core organizing objective of the conservative legal movement since its inception — quite literally the opposite of a ‘new conservative grudge.’”

Democrats had all sorts of odd reactions to the news:

The View co-host Ana Navarro seemed to advocate eugenics in arguing that she believes abortion is necessary because she has a family “with a lot of special needs kids.”

“I have a brother who’s 57 and has the mental and motor skills of a one-year-old and I know what that means financially, emotionally, physically for a family and I know not all families can do it,” she said, adding that she has a step-grandaughter with Down syndrome and a step-grandson “who is very autistic.”

“The mother and people are in that society and that community will tell you that they’ve considered suicide because that’s how difficult it is to get help, because that’s how lonely they feel, because they can’t get other jobs, because they have financial issues, because the care that they’re able to give their other children suffers,” she said.

Navarro doubled down in response to the backlash, telling her detractors to “eat sh**.”

Some writers, including Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, dishonestly claimed that overturning Roe was equivalent to bringing about forced births in the U.S.:

 

Others turned their ire toward Justice Clarence Thomas, suggesting the Court could be poised to take away some of his rights.

The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg said, “You better hope that they don’t come for you, Clarence, and say you should not be married to your wife, who happens to be white,” suggesting that the Court could overturn Loving v. Virginia, which protects the right to interracial marriage.

“You better hope that nobody says you’re not in the Constitution, you’re back to being a quarter of a person because that’s not going to work either,” she added.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson similarly tweeted, “How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!” He seemed to be calling Thomas an “Uncle Tom” — a person seen as betraying their cultural or social allegiance.

Meanwhile, a meme made the rounds that suggested the Statue of Liberty was “walking back to France,” despite France having a national 14-week ban on abortion.

By contrast, some Democrats, including Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, support abortion without limits: 

Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) spoke at a pro-choice rally in St. Louis where protesters chanted “Free abortion on demand, the people hate abortion bans!” and one speaker called abortion an “act of love.”

Headline Fail of the Week

This week’s dishonor goes to the Nation, which published an article titled, “Abortion Involves Killing—and That’s OK!”

“There is something infantilizing about denying the fact that embryos die when we scrape them out of the bodies of which they are a part,” author Sophie Lewis writes. “It sentimentalizes pregnant or potentially pregnant humans as fundamentally nonviolent creatures to imply that we can’t handle the truth about what we are up to when we opt out. And it patronizes abortion-getters to insist that we are only making a health care choice, rather than (also) extinguishing a future child.”

Media Misses

• Noah Smith wonders if the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, might seek to overturn Brown v. Board of Education and reinstall the “separate but equal” standard for public services. All men may have been created equal, but all political commentators were not.

• Neal Katyal, former solicitor general of the United States, purports to be worried that Clarence Thomas — one half of an interracial marriage — is going to vote to overturn the precedent set by Loving v. Virginia, which barred states from prohibiting such unions.

• Alex Wagner, presently a co-host of Showtime’s The Circus, will be taking over for Rachel Maddow in the 9 p.m. time slot on MSNBC. Here’s an example of the insight and depth she’ll bring to the role.

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