“Saturday Night Live” joked about abortion last weekend during its “Weekend Update” segment, focusing the ‘joke’ specifically on Arizona’s recent state Supreme Court decision to allow a longstanding pro-life law put in place in 1864 to go into effect.
“Reinstating laws from 1864 isn’t the worst thing for me, because I’m a white landowner,” co-host Colin Jost said. “And a proud Freemason.” Jost, who is white, and co-host Michael Che, who is Black, have a running racism joke between them with Che often joking that Jost is racist.
“But it’s probably not great to adopt healthcare rules from a time where the only two things doctors prescribed were prayer and cocaine — Saturday and Sunday,” said Jost. “Back then, if you didn’t want to keep your baby, your only option was to give it to Rumpelstiltskin.”
He added, “President Biden criticized the abortion law, calling it cruel, which is the same thing Biden said when he voted against it in 1864.”
While this was a poke at Biden’s age, in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, Biden was a new senator. At that time, he said he thought the ruling went too far and that a woman didn’t have “the sole right to say what should happen to her body” while pregnant.
Believe it or not, Biden supported laws preventing the use of taxpayer money to fund abortions — and, according to National Review, even wrote his own ‘Biden Amendment” to ban federal funding for foreign abortion research. The New York Times stated that as a senator, Biden also voted for a constitutional amendment to allow states to overturn Roe back in 1982.
So… perhaps if Biden had been around in 1864, he may have been in support of Arizona’s pro-life law, since his stance on abortion has clearly devolved over the decades.
As to whether a law from 1864 should be removed from the books simply because of its age — it’s a ridiculous concept.
Murder has been illegal in the United States since the new nation first made laws — because the taking of human life has always been considered immoral and always should be considered immoral. The U.S. makes an exception when it comes to human beings in the womb — which doesn’t make their willful killings morally acceptable, just legal.
It was in 1864 that the Senate took the first step in abolishing slavery in the United States by passing the 13th Amendment — the same year the Arizona law was written. So a law’s age doesn’t automatically make it bad law… does it, SNL?
WARNING: Readers may be disturbed by the images below.
What makes a law bad is its immorality, and laws allowing the killing of innocent and defenseless human beings are immoral — and cruel.
The most commonly used second-trimester abortion procedure involves the use of a Sopher clamp to grip down on the baby’s legs and arms and pull with force to tear them off the baby. In March of 2022, the bodies of children who were put through this horrific procedure at a Washington, D.C. abortion facility were discovered in a medical waste bin. Their pictures are below.
Che and Jost continued with abortion jokes pointed at Donald Trump, including Trump’s current stated opinion that laws about whether to allow or prevent the killing of preborn human beings should be left up to the states.
The truth is that human rights shouldn’t be up for a vote at any level of government. Human rights, including the right to life, should be protected — and the 14th Amendment does just that.