ATLANTA, Georgia, November 21, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Democrat candidates gathered Wednesday evening for another presidential primary debate, during which they again stressed to left-wing voters that they would work to block states from implementing their own pro-life reforms.
The candidates, all of whom have already endorsed virtually unlimited abortion at taxpayers’ expense, were asked to respond to recent abortion developments at the state level, from heartbeat abortion bans like the one in Georgia to pro-life Democrat John Bel Edwards winning reelection to the governorship of Louisiana.
“I believe that abortion rights are human rights,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts declared. “I believe that they are also economic rights. And protecting the right of a woman to be able to make decisions about her own body is fundamentally what we do and what we stand for as a Democratic Party.”
She went on to argue that banning abortion would “fall hard on poor women” because the rich can travel to states or countries where abortion remains legal, and invoked the spectre of girls pregnant after having “been molested by an uncle” (without mentioning that men raping underage girls rely on abortion to eliminate the evidence of their abuse).
The moderator pressed Warren on whether there was room for pro-life Democrats such as Bel Edwards in the party, to which she simply said that she was “not here to try to drive anyone out of this party.”
“We should codify Roe v. Wade into law,” answerd Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. She went on to tie heartbeat bills to President Donald Trump’s quickly retracted 2016 comments that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who abort (in fact, heartbeat bills only punish abortionists).
She also declared that she “just can’t wait to stand across from Donald Trump and say this to him: ‘You know what? The people are with us.’ Over 70 percent of the people support Roe v. Wade. Over 90 percent of the people support funding for Planned Parenthood and making sure that women can get the health care they need.” In fact, a range of polls consistently show that a majority of Americans would ban most abortions.
Self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont used his 30 seconds to declare that now is the time “where the men of this country must stand with the women…and I get very tired, very tired of hearing the hypocrisy from conservatives who say, ‘Get the government off our backs, we want small government.’ Well, if you want to get the government out of the backs of the American people, then understand that it is women who control their own bodies, not politicians.”
Though a common pro-abortion talking point (and one the Libertarian Party reaffirmed last night), it relies on a fundamental distortion of limited-government philosophy, under which the core function of government is to protect individual rights, with protecting the right to life against violence chief among them.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey used his answer to frame abortion as a “voter suppression issue,” blaming the Georgia heartbeat law’s enactment partly on the false claim that Democrat Stacey Abrams had the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her. “This gets back to the issue about making sure we are fighting every single day, that whoever is the nominee, they can overcome the attempts to suppress the votes, particularly of low-income and minority voters and particularly in the black communities we saw here in Georgia,” Booker said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden currently leads the Democrat field in RealClearPolitics’ polling average at 29.8%, followed by Warren at 19.3%, Sanders at 18.5%, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 7.8%.