Julia Ioffe: 'What If You Could Perform an Abortion with an AR-15?'

Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent for Puck News, found herself in hot water on Wednesday night when she tweeted that 2nd Amendment advocates would suddenly be for banning AR-15 rifles if they were tools used in abortions.

“What if you could perform an abortion with an AR-15? What if the 19 kids killed [in] Uvalde weren’t children, but fetuses?” Ioffe said in her now-deleted tweet.

Twitter users immediately pounced on Ioffe for not only using the horrible tragedy in Texas as a vehicle to plug abortion but also for suggesting that 19 children would suddenly have no inherent value to her if they were killed in the womb – a mad dash of irony that seemed to escape her.

“You’d defend it?” responded National Journalism Center program director Becket Adams. “What even is the purpose of tweets like hers? What good does it serve? Nothing of value has been done on this website in the past 72 hours, and it’s only getting worse.”

“Don’t kill kids at school and don’t kill kids in the womb — in fact don’t kill them anywhere — is my baseline. Is it yours?” tweeted Washington Examiner reporter Jerry Dunleavy.

“Where have I seen this before? Oh, right, on a pro-life t-shirt,” tweeted National Review Washington correspondent John McCormack.

Though Ioffe deleted the tweet, she issued no apology. As noted by Fox News, her statement echoes her flub from 2021 in which she made an inadvertent pro-life argument while attacking the Texas Heartbeat Act.

“If you are anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy contribute? Why not have men pay child support to the women they impregnate? Surely, it is not the woman’s responsibility alone?” she tweeted.

Indeed, hardcore leftists and opposers of gun rights have (quite oddly) been citing abortion as some trump card against pro-lifers in the wake of the Texas massacre.

“YOU CAN KILL CHILDREN IN SCHOOL IN TEXAS BUT CAN’T GET AN ABORTION,” tweeted Rob Reiner’s daughter, Romy Reiner, which the director himself retweeted.