Warren, Bloomberg, and Abortion Doublespeak

In the last 24 hours alone, there were two egregious examples of the dishonest doublespeak that we use in describing abortion. The first is from a CNN article by Caroline Kelly:

Did you catch that? She said that the bill “would require abortion providers to work to ‘preserve the life and health’ of a fetus that was born following an attempted abortion as they would for a newborn baby.” And what’s the difference between these two? Apparently, whether or not the mother wants the baby. If she does, it’s a newborn baby. If she doesn’t, it’s just a fetus that’s been born. At this point, we’re not just dehumanizing children in the womb. We’re dehumanizing them after they have been born. We’re no longer talking abortion, at this point: we’re talking sheer infanticide.

Making matters worse, Kelly puts the part about “life and health” in scare quotes, as if the controversial part here is whether or not newborn babies possess things like life and health, but she leaves the doublespeak without them, as if it’s widely accepted that newborn fetuses and newborn babies are different things.

A few hours after I saw this, I saw highlights from the South Carolina Democratic debate, and this exchange (the first one in the video) really stuck out:

First of all, credit where it’s due to Warren for bringing up pregnancy discrimination. It’s a pro-life issue: if women risk losing their jobs for having a baby, it makes it a great deal more likely that they’ll choose to abort, since you’re creating a huge financial disincentive to refuse abortion. But there’s something utterly surreal about the whole exchange. Here’s what Warren claims:

When I was 21 years old, I got my first job as a special education teacher. I loved that job. And by the end of the first year, I was year, I was visibly pregnant. The the principal wished me luck and gave my job to someone else. Pregnancy discrimination, you bet. But I was 21 years old. I didn’t have a union to protect me. And I didn’t have any federal law on my side. So I packed up my stuff, and I went home. At least I didn’t have a boss who said to me, “kill it,” the way that mayor Bloomberg is alleged to have said to one of his pregnant employees.

It’s worth noting that every major detail here is controverted: the entire story about Warren getting fired may be made up (she originally claimed said that she quit, and that’s what the documents show), and Bloomberg has always strongly denied making the “kill it” comments, including under oath. But here’s the context, and it doesn’t look great for Mike:

In 1998, a former Bloomberg LP employee named Sekiko Sakai Garrison sued the company, alleging that Bloomberg had said those words when she told him she was pregnant. She also said he added, “Great! Number 16!” which was a reference to the fact that 16 of his employees were either pregnant or on maternity leave. Bloomberg denied making the comment at the time and did so again at Tuesday night’s debate. But earlier this month, a second former Bloomberg employee who was present for the conversation confirmed Garrison’s account of it to the Washington Post. 

What makes this whole debate surreal is that, while Bloomberg and Warren spar over whether or not Bloomberg is the kind of monster who would tell a woman to kill her unborn child, both of them are actively working to make it easier for women around the country to kill theirs.

Vox praised Warren’s pro-choice policies as “aggressive,” including codifying Roe v. Wade as federal law, repealing the Hyde Amendment, requiring insurance coverage for abortion, making it harder for states to even regulate abortion clinics (even in little ways, like requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, in case something goes wrong in the abortion). This kind of radical advocacy is how we end up with folks like Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who was performing abortions in filthy conditions in a clinic in Philadelphia, sometimes murdering babies after they were born, and collecting body parts as trophies. As the story later emerged, the State of Pennsylvania didn’t intervene when they should have, because ensuring even basic sanitary conditions for abortion clinics might cause a political firestorm. Warren’s proposals would make it harder, not easier, for states in this situation to do the right thing.

Bloomberg’s policies are largely the same, but he also promises to “encourage states to expand the types of medical professionals permitted to perform abortions like physician assistants, nurse practitioners and certified nurse-midwives.” In this view, the problem with the abortion epidemic is that we need more abortionists, and ones with less medical training.

But let’s cut through the doublespeak. Either abortion is killing an unborn human, or it’s not.

If it isn’t, then Bloomberg’s (alleged) comments were rude and invasive, but not much more so than if he had encouraged an employee to have any other type of surgery, or had advised her not to get pregnant in the first place. This wouldn’t really be enough to explain why he shouldn’t become president. It also doesn’t really explain what’s going on here, or the emotional gravity of the point that Warren is making.

Warren’s point is that Bloomberg knows that abortion is killing, and so does she. Otherwise, the back-and-forth makes little sense. But if that’s true, then Bloomberg’s (alleged) comments are awful, but his and Warren’s policies are several orders of magnitude worse. The pro-choice Alan Guttmacher Institute estimates that “if Roe v. Wade were overturned or weakened, increases in travel distances would likely prevent 93,500 to 143,500 individuals each year from accessing abortion care.”

Both sides know that this is what realistically hangs in the balance. We aren’t going to see a situation in which the Supreme Court limits or overturns Roe, and abortions totally disappear overnight. But we can get to (and may even be on the cusp of, or within one Supreme Court vote of) a situation in which Roe is limited, and states are permitted to outlaw or at least better regulate abortion. That would almost immediately save
93,500 to 143,500 lives per year.

Bear in mind, that’s the number of lives saved just from making abortions harder to get to. AGI’s also looked at the stats on things like mandatory counseling and waiting periods, and found that they reduce the number of abortions by about 11-13%. We’re not talking about women being driven to “back-alley abortions” here. We’re talking about women who either go slightly further to get an abortion, or else take a few more days, and then decide that they actually want to keep their babies. Even from a pro-choice perspective, it’s hard to see how these could be bad outcomes. Yet both Bloomberg and Warren are hellbent on fighting even mild restrictions, and each of them have pledged to make abortion easierto get.

If abortion is killing, Warren and Bloomberg are advocating for it on a much bigger and uglier scale than simply encouraging one employee to kill her child. And it’s only because of the thick mists of abortion doublespeak that we can’t see that.