Spare Us the Fake Moral Outrage
Republicans are letting people needlessly die from COVID-19 but have the audacity to say they’re “pro-life.”
Photos: Gage Skidmore/NASA HQ/Gage Skidmore, all Flickr
September marks the start of the final stretch of the presidential race amid a pandemic that’s killed 190,000 Americans so far and has left millions of unemployed people on the brink of eviction. Fear not: Republican politicians are here to tell voters just how outraged they are about...people’s private choice to have a legal medical procedure.
That’s right: We’re in the last few weeks before the election so it’s time to demonize people who have abortions in order to project a faux moral authority while taking zero meaningful steps to control a raging pandemic! I’m joking about this only because it’s such an infuriating, cynical ploy to appeal to anti-abortion voters in swing states who Trump needs to win re-election. Since the end of July, we've been losing a 9/11-number of Americans to the virus *every three to four days* and they have the gall to profess that they’re ardent defenders of life.
Here’s what has transpired in the first nine days of September.
Senator Ted Cruz kicked the month off with a bang with a letter signed by 19 other Republican colleagues asking the FDA to ban mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion. Almost 40% of all abortions in the U.S. are done via this method, yet Cruz claims that mifepristone is an “imminent hazard to the public health.” Cruz writes that, in the nearly 20 years it’s been on the market, mifepristone has caused 24 maternal deaths, 4,200 complications, and “has taken more than 3.7 million preborn lives.”
Cruz trips over himself to value fetal lives over those of pregnant people. “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” Cruz writes, “and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease.” In fact, pregnancy kills an estimated 700 to 900 American women per year and causes severe complications in another 50,000 more. He doubled down on this moronic position in a tweet.
Days later, President Donald Trump sent his own letter, this one to pro-life groups, in which he asked for “help in contrasting [his] bold pro-life leadership with Joe Biden’s abortion extremism...forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions is an abhorrent position that must be defeated at the ballot box.”
If you ask me, an abhorrent position is Trump saying in March that 100,000 COVID-19 deaths would be “a very good job” because it could have been in the millions if he’d done absolutely nothing and let the virus rip through the whole population, and then saying in September, when the death toll had absolutely blown past the “very good job level,” claiming that 180,000 deaths still wasn’t that bad because, hey, it could have been worse. “It is what it is” is an abhorrent position, one that illustrates how Trump and Republicans value corporate profits over human lives.
Vice President Mike Pence has been touring anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers—that is, fake health clinics that exist to discourage people from having abortions—with the “pro-life” lobbying group Susan B. Anthony List in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Pence’s office says that as part of the Pennsylvania visit, the Vice President will participate in a "fireside chat highlighting President Trump's record as the most Pro-Life president ever." This claim was laughable before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s truly insulting now when we’re looking at the possibility of 400,000 people dead by the end of the year.
"Life is winning in America today," Pence said in North Carolina on September 3. A lot of people would beg to fucking differ.
And now we’ve learned that Trump has known how serious COVID-19 is but downplayed it to the country. In recorded interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward, Trump said in February that he knew the virus was airborne and much more deadly than the seasonal flu, but publicly he was saying it was no worse than the flu and that it would disappear soon. Trump told Woodward in March he wanted to play down the virus because he didn’t want to “create a panic.”
Hours after this damaging revelation, Trump, likely wanting to change the media narrative, released his shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees, which, incidentally, includes Cruz. Trump has previously pledged to only nominate “pro-life” Justices, and he went further on the campaign trail by saying he’d only choose people who would overturn the landmark abortion case, Roe v Wade.
Between now and November 3, Trump, Pence, and others will talk about grave sins involving fetuses but remember that they truly don't care how many people die from COVID or suffer from hunger because they lost their jobs—and they’ll still shame people who’d have an abortion rather than try to raise a child during such an uncertain time.
Don’t take their professed morality at face value.
For more writing and reporting, visit my website: susanrinkunas.com.