Marco Rubio has excoriated Hillary Clinton for her “extremist” position on abortion and the mainstream media is coming to her rescue.
Rubio said Hillary supports abortion up to “the due date.” Clinton claims she supports Roe v. Wade and the restrictions that are allowed after viability. But are there really any meaningful restrictions on abortion post-viability?
Roe legalized abortion up to viability — considered at the third trimester — and allowed abortion after viability for certain undefined health reasons. The health reasons were defined in the Doe decision as:
…all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age – relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.
Such a broad definition of health allows abortion providers such wide latitude as to render all restrictions meaningless. For instance, an abortionist may allow a 28-year-old woman to have a late-term abortion because she is too old to have a baby. But a year later the same abortionist may allow a late-term abortion because the same woman is now too young to have a baby.
As pro-life lawyer Clark Forsythe said in his 2013 book “Abuse of Discretion,” “Health, in abortion law, means emotional well-being without limits. Any potential emotional reservation a woman has about being pregnant can be deemed, at the discretion of the abortion provider, as a threat to her ‘health’, and thus a reason to ignore any abortion prohibition after fetal viability.”
David Savage of the LA Times got it right when in 2005 he wrote, “the Supreme Court has indeed created an ‘absolute right to abortion’ where ‘any abortion can be justified.’”
Even so, the main stream media immediately came to Hillary’s rescue and also deliberately obfuscated actual abortion law in America.
Politicfact said Rubio’s claims were simply “false.”
Huffington Post says “most late term abortions remain illegal under federal law” and charges that there are larger and more important abortion question, like restrictions that are closing clinics in Texas.
Keep in mind that Hillary Clinton opposed any restrictions on partial birth abortion, a restriction overwhelmingly supported by the American people and now banned by Congressional action and a Supreme Court decision. Partial birth abortion is where the abortionist turns the baby around in utero so her feet and body are delivered first. She is delivered live up to her head which is then stabbed with scissors so that the abortionist may siphon out the brains and collapse the skull. When the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court, Hillary condemned the decision.
Rubio’s contention about Hillary’s abortion extremism is correct but only when you understand what American abortion law really does. Hillary Clinton supports abortion up to the due date and for any reason because that is the law she defends.
The other thing about Hillary’s evocation of the Roe health exception is that women seeking abortions hardly ever invoke it. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, only 4 percent of women cite their own health as the primary reason they are seeking an abortion.
Marjorie Danenlfeser of the Susan B. Anthony List told Breirbart News that any limitation allowed by Roe is made meaningless by the health definition in Doe.