Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
May 16, 2019
Republicans’ Messaging on Abortion Puts Democrats on the Defensive
With grisly claims that Democrats promote “birth day abortions” and are “the party of death,” the Republican Party and its conservative allies have aggressively reset the terms of one of the country’s most divisive and emotionally fraught debates, forcing Democrats to reassess how they should respond to attacks and distortions that portray the entire party as extremist on abortion.
The unusually forceful, carefully coordinated campaign has created challenges that Democrats did not expect as they struggle to combat misinformation and thwart further efforts to undercut access to abortion. And advocates of abortion rights fear it is succeeding in pressuring lawmakers in more conservative states to pass severe new restrictions, as Alabama did this week by approving a bill that would essentially outlaw the procedure.
These new measures, combined with the likelihood that the Supreme Court will agree to take up at least one case in the coming months where Roe v. Wade will be tested, have stirred intense passions on both sides and elevated abortion into a prominent issue in the presidential race.
Much to the distress of abortion rights supporters, their own polling is showing that the right’s message is penetrating beyond the social conservatives who make up a large part of the Republican base. Surveys conducted for progressive groups in recent weeks found that more than half of Americans were aware of the “infanticide” claims that President Trump and his party have started making when describing abortions that occur later in pregnancy.
Initially, many Democrats and abortion rights groups believed that the notion was so absurd that it was not worth responding to it. But they discovered that was a dangerous assumption to make in an information environment dominated by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump is using the issue to rouse his base, including the crucial voting bloc of Christian conservatives for whom abortion is an overarching issue. His false statements that Democrats would “execute” newborn babies — which he has repeated on his Twitter feed, during his State of the Union address and at campaign rallies, sometimes as he mimics swaddling a baby — are being picked up and repeated by conservatives all over the country.
Activists in the anti-abortion movement, who during previous Republican administrations were left to drive their messages with far more measured public support from the White House, have welcomed the president’s approach as refreshing, saying it has infused them with new purpose and perspective.
Richard Land said he believed Mr. Trump won the votes of evangelicals, and thus the presidency, because of his visceral response to a debate question on abortion.CreditMark Humphrey/Associated Press
Richard Land, a prominent evangelical Christian leader, said he could pinpoint the moment that Donald J. Trump secured his election. It was in the third presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, and the question was about abortion.
“If you go with what Hillary is saying in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” Mr. Trump said.
That emotive, visceral answer, Mr. Land said, was probably enough to win over skeptical working-class Catholic voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, who at that moment found an unlikely champion in Mr. Trump on the single issue that would determine their choice and deliver the White House to Mr. Trump.
“The relationship that evangelicals have with President Trump is a very transactional one,” said Mr. Land, who serves on a spiritual advisory board to the president. “They feel like their voices are heard and he is keeping their promises to them.”
Mr. Land said that Mr. Trump, far more than Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, an evangelical himself, has given evangelicals a place at the table and a welcome at the White House.
As he enters his re-election campaign, Mr. Trump, through his appointment of judges who oppose abortion rights, including to the Supreme Court, and his equally graphic language about late-term abortions, is again speaking a language that evangelicals embrace.
The issue has taken on renewed prominence after the Alabama Legislature passed one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws, drawing fierce opposition from Democratic opponents and presidential candidates seeking to challenge Mr. Trump.
