Hillary Clinton has recently made some extreme political demands when it comes to abortion, but none of them were mentioned during the Democrat debates, much to the dismay of a writer at New York Magazine.
Clinton has urged an increase in taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood – while the abortion business is under congressional investigation for potentially criminal activity. She wants an end to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion-on-demand, primarily because she wants more black women to be able to have abortions.
Her doubling down on abortion rights came as Planned Parenthood gave Clinton an historic primary endorsement.
Despite such a flurry of abortion support, Rebecca Traister writes at New York Magazine that the Democrat debates have shown a “lack of interest in the topic of reproductive justice.”
Traister particularly finds the Hyde Amendment to be a “discriminatory law that perpetuates both economic and racial inequality,” and she is impressed with Clinton’s vigorous opposition it:
Which is what makes it so notable that Hillary Clinton — who, despite a strong record of supporting reproductive rights, has not always spoken about them with righteous vigor (her 2005 discussion of abortion as a “sad, tragic choice for many” enraged many activists) — has decided to publicly do battle against Hyde. Even more important, she is explaining her stance in terms that offer a crucial and long-awaited corrective to the course of the abortion debate in America.
Praising Clinton for her embrace of abortion as a “fundamental human right,” Traister writes:
It would be difficult to overstate how radical it is to hear a mainstream politician address the inability of women to make reproductive choices about their bodies and lives as an economic issue, central to class and racial discrimination in America. Yet no one at any of the four official Democratic debates has asked Clinton about her remarkable amplification of feminist argument.
Apparently, most of America also believes both Clinton’s and Planned Parenthood’s narrative of abortion as women’s taxpayer-funded healthcare is radical as well. On Tuesday, a Marist College Institute for Public Opinion poll found a full 81 percent of Americans favor some restrictions on abortion, including limiting the procedure after the first three months, and a continued ban on public funding of abortion.
In fact, according to the survey of 1,700 Americans, 66 percent of respondents who identify themselves as pro-choice say “abortion should be allowed, at most, in the first trimester, in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, or never permitted.”
Other recent polling from CNN found that a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.
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