Brunswick Beacon, 05.04.23
MAGA Republicans’ extreme abortion laws will guarantee that happens. Desperate to distract from their wildly unpopular, radical repeal of a woman’s freedom to decide what happens to her own body, they’re spreading the cruel lie that heartbroken women suffering doomed pregnancies are heartless baby-killers.
I attended Frank Iler’s April 21 meeting at Brunswick Forest. Iler repeated the MAGA Republican smear, the same disgusting lie Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) used on CNN’s State of the Union. Asked if he supports a federal abortion ban, Graham wouldn’t answer. He deflected with the lie: “Only North Korea and China allow abortion on demand up to the moment of birth, except the Democratic Party.”
Iler, Graham and other MAGA Republicans claim healthy full-term fetuses are being murdered by fickle women too lazy to be mothers. The lie says more about MAGA Republicans than about those anguished would-be mothers.
The National Institutes of Health says viability occurs at 24 weeks of pregnancy. Less than 1% of abortions happen after 21 weeks. These are pregnancies where fetuses cannot survive, or have already died. Forcing a woman to carry such a pregnancy to term can kill her.
Since Roe was overturned women have been denied healthcare, forced to carry doomed, even dead fetuses. One nearly died from sepsis, another from losing half her body’s blood while delivering in a hairdresser’s toilet. Republicans callously blocked the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022 that permits a life-saving abortion if a woman’s doctor determines she would otherwise die. THAT’s what Republicans cruelly call the “abortion on demand until birth act!”
Iler asked us, “Do you believe in abortion up to the day of birth?” Seriously, Frank? Nobody ‘believes in' aborting a living fetus on the day of birth. MAGA Republicans use that outrageous, insulting question as a smokescreen to hide their invasive attempt to come between a woman and her doctor. If MAGA Republicans get their way, more women will die. It’s that simple.
Joanne Levitan
Leland