Democrats and the media are conspiring to sow confusion about pro-life laws.
Democrats and the media are conspiring to sow confusion about pro-life laws.
W e’re being played.
The Harris campaign wants abortion to be the central issue of the 2024 presidential election. So, the Democratic nominee’s allies in the press and Congress are working sweaty-palm-in-glove to make this happen by any means necessary, including the production and dissemination of outright disinformation.
The combined effort looks a little like this: A Democrat-aligned outlet prints a pro-abortion story that is, at best, flimsy or, at worst, an outright misrepresentation. Pro-abortion legislators then take the story to Congress, where they introduce a proposal or promote a related piece of pro-abortion legislation. The pro-abortion legislator cites the pro-abortion story explicitly as a justification for the legislative action. Republicans call out the effort as political theater. The attempt fails. Then comes the next news cycle, which is overloaded with headlines such as “Republicans Block Efforts to Protect All Women Everywhere” or “GOP Opposes Protecting Women, Children.”
It’s a closed-loop system, one in which the press and congressional Democrats provide one another with fresh ammunition with which to hammer conservatives.
In other words, we’re witnessing something akin to “stove-piping” on the abortion front. (For the uninitiated, the term “stove-piping” denotes a specific type of information-laundering between reporters and government actors. Journalist Matt Taibbi defines it as when government officials use “the press to ‘confirm’ information the officials themselves pulled out of pools of raw intel, past any internal review system, and fed the reporter.”)
Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.), for example, introduced a resolution this month seeking to express “the sense of the Senate that every patient has the basic right to emergency health care, including abortion care, regardless of where they live.” In promoting her proposal, Murray, who tried to pass the resolution via unanimous consent, cited a viral ProPublica series that pins the 2022 death of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old mother who had developed sepsis following a chemical abortion, on the United States Supreme Court and the state of Georgia. ProPublica’s coverage leads readers to believe that doctors hesitated to render aid because they were just too darn confused and scared by recent Court rulings and pro-life legislation.
Speaking about Thurman, Murray said she lost her life “due to the state’s draconian abortion ban.” She claimed that Thurman “could have survived” had she “been able to get the health care” she needed.
“These are the consequences of Trump abortion bans,” Murray concluded.
This misrepresents what happened. Thurman developed a severe infection following a chemical abortion. After her sepsis symptoms worsened, she went to the emergency room for what should have been a routine dilation and curettage procedure, which is legal everywhere in Thurman’s circumstances, including in Georgia. However, instead of getting prompt, lifesaving care, Thurman was made to wait for 20 hours before anyone would see her. She died soon after being taken into an operating room. This is not a story about pro-life laws. It’s a story about what appears to be medical malpractice, as no state or federal law prohibits doctors from providing a D&C in situations like Thurman’s.
Most importantly, no health-care professional involved in the Thurman case has said anything about the matter, let alone blamed her death on the overturning of Roe v. Wade or the enactment of Georgia’s fetal-heartbeat law. No doctor is on the record (or even on background) suggesting being paralyzed by a fear of criminal liability. But this hasn’t stopped ProPublica, a dark-money group that survives on a healthy diet of million-dollar-plus cash infusions from left-wing billionaires, from faulting pro-life legislation all the same. And it is remarkably dishonest, not just because there’s no evidence to support ProPublica’s central thesis but also because Georgia law is clear on the matter.
For reference, the state’s abortion law defines abortion as “using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child.” However, it also explicitly provides that “any such act shall not be considered an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose of: (A) Removing a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion; or (B) Removing an ectopic pregnancy.”
As for Senator Murray, Senate Republicans blocked her request for unanimous consent. Another Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, tried to pass a bill that would have seen tax dollars used to offset the cost of abortion tourism. Like Murray, Baldwin sought unanimous consent. As with Murray’s request, Republicans blocked Baldwin. And like Murray, Baldwin tied her proposal directly to the ProPublica disinformation workshop.
“Last week,” the Wisconsin lawmaker said, “[we] heard the story of a woman who died because she was denied abortion care until it was too late.”
Meanwhile, Thurman’s name has been invoked repeatedly by the Democratic presidential nominee on the campaign trail.
Baldwin’s and Murray’s efforts are in addition to the votes Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) arranged earlier this year to protect access to contraception, codify access to in vitro fertilization, and mandate insurance coverage for IVF. The IVF votes are especially curious, considering that neither Republican nominee Donald Trump nor any high-ranking GOP leader has suggested banning the practice. There again, you’d think otherwise from following the news headlines. The anti-Republican IVF headlines are not so curious when you recognize they follow the same pattern as the coverage of Murray’s and Baldwin’s political theater.
It’s that closed-loop system in which the media feed stories to congressional Democrats, who in turn feed the media with legislative proposals in reaction to said stories.
Regarding ProPublica’s reporting on Georgia and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, there is undoubtedly an element of information-laundering between a so-called newsroom and government officials. A critical reading of ProPublica’s initial coverage of Thurman’s death should give any reader pause, let alone a member of the world’s most powerful deliberative body. One glaring problem is that ProPublica only theorizes that Georgia law and the Supreme Court are to blame — while ignoring, as my colleague Dan McLaughlin writes, the role of the abortion pill itself and the rollback of federal regulations pertaining to it.
Congressional Democrats are happy to be ProPublica’s dance partner. After all, they want abortion front and center in the election. It’s a sorry spectacle when ProPublica, working its partisan angle, gives them a pretext to use Congress’s upper and lower chambers to hammer their opponents. Together, they’re mainstreaming abortion-friendly propaganda.