GOP’s rhetoric on abortion is a deceptive lie

It starts with a lie. Republican politicians, aware that a solid majority of American voters support a woman’s right to an abortion and consider stringent abortion bans to be extremist, paint their opponents as the true extremists on the issue.

GOP elected officials often talk about “late-term abortions” and “partial-birth abortions.” They accuse Democrats of supporting abortion up to — and even after — the moment of birth.

They relentlessly mislead the American public.

That’s how we end up with the Kate Cox case. That’s how we find the attorney general of Texas and the state’s Supreme Court dictating to a woman whether she can make an intensely personal health decision. That’s how the self-proclaimed party of individual liberty wedges itself into conversations between women and their doctors.

Cox, a 31-year-old Dallas mother of two, discovered in late November that the child she was carrying had trisomy 18, a fetal anomaly that is usually fatal.

Her doctor told her that she needed to terminate the pregnancy to protect her own health and preserve her hopes for having children in the future. But Ken Paxton, the state’s indicted and impeached attorney general, decided to step in and prevent Cox from receiving an abortion.

When a Travis County district judge granted Cox a temporary restraining order, Paxton threatened doctors with prosecution if they participated in terminating Cox’s pregnancy. Paxton successfully appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, forcing Cox to leave the state to receive an abortion.

This is what extremism looks like. This is what inhumanity, cloaked in self-righteous slogans about protecting the sanctity of human life, looks like.

It’s the product of a long, willful Republican campaign to distort the abortion issue.

When Republicans talk about this issue, they fixate on the phrase “late-term abortion.” It’s not a medical term recognized by doctors. It’s a political term.

It’s important to know that 93 percent of abortions in the United States in 2021, the most recent year reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were performed within the first 13 weeks of gestation. Less than 1 percent occurred at 21 weeks or later.

When women have abortions after 21 weeks, it’s generally because they’ve received a diagnosis of a severe medical problem or because their state’s strict abortion ban made it difficult for them to access abortion services earlier in their pregnancy.

Republicans persist in depicting scenarios in which women who have endured eight or nine months of pregnancy suddenly decide that they’ve changed their mind and don’t want to have the baby.

“In some liberal states, you actually have post-birth abortions and I think that’s wrong,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

DeSantis’ chief GOP rival, former President Donald Trump, has often made similar claims.

At a 2019 Florida rally, Trump said, “Democrats are aggressively pushing late-term abortion, allowing children to be ripped from their mother’s womb, right up until the moment of birth. The baby is born and you wrap the baby beautifully and you talk to the mother about the possible execution of the baby.”

At a 2020 campaign stop in Oklahoma, Trump said Democrats want to “subsidize lateterm abortion and after-birth execution.”

Taking a child’s life after birth isn’t an abortion. It’s homicide, and it’s illegal in every state in this country. Republicans know this, but they’re operating on the assumption that their supporters are easily duped.

At his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump thoroughly misrepresented a New York law that allows women to get an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy if “there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.”

Trump said “lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth.”

Far from the usual GOP depiction of post-21-week abortions as cruel, heartless acts, they are most often what we saw in the Cox case: heartbreaking stories of women who very much wanted to have a child and were forced to terminate a pregnancy because it was not viable; the baby was not going to survive and the mother’s health was at risk.

It starts with a lie. And it ends with Ken Paxton making your medical decisions for you.