When Donald Trump said in 2016 that women who get abortions should be subjected to “some form of punishment,” I thought well, the poor thing clearly has no idea that that isn’t how real pro-lifers think or talk.
Actual pro-life advocates, as I wrote at the time, just about blew a fuse when they heard Trump’s comment.
One of the activists I quoted that day, Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said, “Mr. Trump’s comment today is completely out of touch with the pro-life movement. Being pro-life means wanting what is best for the mother and the baby. . . . No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion. This is against the very nature of what we are about.”
To me, it was. But as it turned out, more than a few anti-abortion officeholders are in fact quite keen to punish those who choose abortion. That’s why Kate Cox has had to flee Texas to end a wanted pregnancy that turned out to be nonviable, life-threatening and a risk to her ability to have more children, as she and her husband very much want to do.
A 31-year-old mother of two, Cox had been to the emergency room at least three times, according to a legal filing, experiencing “severe cramping, diarrhea, and leaking unidentifiable fluid.” Under those circumstances, what kind of a monster would deny her the compassion and care she needs?
Meet Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who was impeached by his fellow Trumpublicans earlier this year, over bribery and corruption charges. He decided that Cox’s doctor and hospital should face “civil and criminal liability” including “first-degree felonies” if they help end her medical nightmare.
Paxton, who is not a doctor, and would no longer be an attorney general, either, if Trump had not pressured Texas lawmakers to reconsider his removal, somehow determined that Cox’s doctor had not met “all of the elements necessary to fall within an exception to Texas’ abortion laws.” The judge who found otherwise, he said, was likewise “not medically qualified to make this determination.” But Paxton is?
In response to his appeal, the Texas Supreme Court blocked and then overturned the ruling that would have allowed her to end her pregnancy even under the state’s near-total abortion ban.
Anti-abortion ballot initiatives
Unfortunately, Paxton is far from the only abortion opponent who is determined to do what pro-life movement leaders had for so many years said they would never do, which is treat women who abort like criminals.
This cruelty is why even in red states, where a high percentage of voters self-identify as pro-life, antiabortion ballot initiatives keep losing. If more of those who do support some abortion limits also supported these measures, they wouldn’t keep flying into the side of a mountain in places like Kansas and Kentucky and Ohio, would they?
Yet I see little to no awareness that this is happening at least in part because voters who identify as pro-life actually believed that meant supporting women in crisis pregnancies instead of shackling them.
The problem for the pro-life movement post-Dobbs is not, as Republicans keep arguing, a messaging problem.
It’s that the message from lawmakers who want to subject women who abort to punishment is both clear and terrifying.
Melinda Henneberger is a columnist for the Kansas City Star.
