Egberto wrote a good diary (with different content) about Rachel’s 21 minutes of awesome yesterday. Read it here. You can also see the embedded video there. But I spent some time last night transcribing her last few minutes, because it was breathtaking. You can watch it there or read it here. Rachel is my hero.
If you are pro-life, that means you don’t think a woman has the right to have an abortion if she wants one. It means you’re anti-abortion. It doesn’t just mean you won’t get an abortion in your own life, but that nobody else can get an abortion either. When a politician says he or she is pro-life, and will govern as such, what that means is that they would like abortion to be outlawed. It means that they want the United States of America to be a place where getting an abortion is a crime. And that means that anybody who gets an abortion is a criminal. Follow me here. This is what Chris Matthews was getting to with Donald Trump. This is what he admitted to that so upset everybody. He said it out loud. If we become a pro-life country, where abortion is illegal, then anytime any woman gets pregnant in the United States, she will face a government mandate which means that she must bring that pregnancy to term, and she must give birth by order of the government. The government will use criminal law to monitor every pregnancy in this country and will force every woman to give birth, even if it is against her will. That’s what it means in brass tax.
It means that if you’re a woman in America, and we become a pro-life country, because the anti-abortion side wins, that means your pregnancy test is potentially criminal evidence. If you have a miscarriage, god forbid, every physical aspect of your miscarriage is potentially criminal evidence. The site of your miscarriage is potentially going to be treated and investigated as a crime scene.
In a pro-life country, if the government knows you to be pregnant, and you do not give birth 9 months later, that will be a matter for the police to investigate. Donald Trump says he is pro-life. Ted Cruz is not only anti-abortion, but anti-abortion in every instance. Under a president Ted Cruz, he would go further than Donald Trump and impose the same criminal regime, not just on women broadly, but specifically on women who became pregnant because they were raped or they were the victim of incest. So, god forbid some 13 year old girl gets raped in America by her evil uncle, and gets impregnated. Under a Ted Cruz presidency, if he gets his way, that 13 year old girl’s pregnancy would become a matter for the state – the government – to monitor. And criminal law would be used to force that 13 year old girl to bring that pregnancy to term. And it would force her to give birth to her rapist’s child against her will under penalty of criminal law.
So it seems like these comments from Donald Trump’s yesterday are outrageous, while Ted Cruz is the reasonable one. The anti-abortion movement does not like to talk about that part of what their agenda would mean for our country [the ‘punishment’ for the crime of abortion]. The anti-abortion movement does not like any public reminders of the part of their movement that shoots doctors – and says it’s justified to do so. But presidential candidate Ted Cruz has not been particularly diligent about keeping a bright line between his own anti-abortion politics, his own anti-abortion campaign, and the radical anti-abortion politics that have brought about the Operation Save America [doctors addresses online, urging people to murder them, “justifiably” that openly support and endorse his campaign] and Operation Rescue’s of this world. His opponent, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, he has not been particularly good at keeping a bright line between what he wants to be seen as mainstream anti-abortion Republican politics, and the politically awkward, but true fact, of what it would mean for American women if Republicans get their way, if the anti-abortion movement gets their way and they succeed in making abortion a crime and every American woman who seeks one into a criminal.
So…just a note to the national media. Everybody is all over Donald Trump on this one. … The idea that there is any distance between what Donald Trump said yesterday and the aims of the anti-abortion movement in this country -- is a fallacy.