Judge Amy Coney Barrett has not even been confirmed to the Supreme Court, yet Democrats are already in hysterics over the fate of the Roe v. Wade. Perhaps the most absurd warnings came from Senator Cory Booker. He used his time to explain how “people are scared right now… because they know what a future without the protections of Roe v. Wade looks like.”
Booker’s time was chock full of repeating those lies which just won’t die, with claims and talking points that “without Roe v. Wade, our country looks like people being denied the ability to make decisions about their own bodies” and that women would be “left with no options.” He focuses on how overturning Roe “looks like state laws proliferating throughout our country, who seek to control and criminalize women.” Booker even claimed that without Roe, “states may write laws that could subject women with miscarriages to investigations to ensure they didn’t have abortions,” conflating entirely different issues.
The truth is, if Roe were to be reversed, abortion would be left to the people to decide, through their elected state legislators. Further, pregnancy resource centers have been and will be there as one of those “options” for women. This is all despite the efforts of Booker’s own party, including and especially when it comes to the attacks of Kamala Harris, who is now the vice-presidential nominee. Fortunately, a California law forcing pregnancy centers to post notices about where to access state-funded abortions, which Harris was instrumental in, was ruled unconstitutional. Above all, pro-lifers do not want to criminalize women.
Booker went on to further mislead on the situation:
Donald Trump and my senate Republican colleagues know that the majority of Americans do not want Roe v. Wade overturned. A majority of Americans don’t want to see abortion criminalized in our states. But that is exactly why we are here today. Donald Trump and senate Republicans know that the American people do not want this. So they have to act now.
In reality, Americans don’t fully understand what overturning Roe entails. According to the Pew Research Center, only 44 percent of those under 30 in 2013 knew it was about abortion. Roe is not merely a landmark case on abortion; it legalized abortion on demand in all 50 states. If you want limits on abortion, you’re actually opposed to Roe v. Wade then.
Further, Americans do want states to be able to decide their abortion laws. When it comes to Millennials, who make up the largest voting bloc, 65 percent support the right to vote on abortion-related policies, according to a Students for Life’s Institute for Pro-Life Advancement poll. According to a Knights of Columbus/Marist poll, a plurality of respondents at 46 percent said the Supreme Court should “Allow certain restrictions on abortions as determined by each state” when asked “what the Supreme Court should do when it reconsiders Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling making abortion legal in the United States…”
No matter how many times the abortion movement talks about how pro-lifers “seek to… criminalize women,” nothing could be further from the truth. Neither proposed legislation nor law, at either the federal or state level, criminalizes women for abortion. Pro-lifers do not believe in criminalizing a woman for her circumstances which brought her to her abortion, of which she is also a victim of. This is something which has been emphasized multiple times for years, apparently to deaf ears.
Further demonstrating the illiteracy of pro-abortion attempts to smear pro-life efforts, history doesn’t support this claim either. Americans United for Life’s Clarke D. Forsythe has written extensively on the abortion issue, including to do with the pre-Roe era. He puts it quite clearly when writing “Why the States Did Not Prosecute Women for Abortion Before Roe v. Wade,” that such claims about criminalizing women do so “without any evidence and contrary to the well-documented practice of ALL 50 states.”
What is particularly key is how even in states “in which statutes technically made it a crime for the woman to participate in her own abortion… these were not enforced or applied against women. There is no record of any prosecution of a woman as an accomplice even in these states.”
In fact, Forsythe explains how it was actually the abortionist who wanted the woman to be prosecuted:
The irony is that, instead of states prosecuting women, the exact opposite is true. To protect their own hide, it was abortionists (like the cult hero and abortionist Ruth Barnett when Oregon last prosecuted her in 1968), who, when they were prosecuted, sought to haul the women they aborted into court. As a matter of criminal evidentiary law, if the court treated the woman as an accomplice, she could not testify against the abortionist, and the case against the abortionist would be thrown out.
Senator Booker is not just some random abortion supporter on Twitter spreading lies about what overturning Roe entails. He is a U.S. Senator and was a presidential candidate, and thus with a large platform which could be better employed.
