Recently, abortion hit the political arena when Senator Rand Paul, a GOP presidential candidate, asked Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, if it’s “okay to kill a 7-pound baby in the uterus.”
The discussion has certainly gotten media attention, but last week Fox News focused on the abortion debate in particularly noteworthy detail.
On April 14, Wasserman Schultz was on Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File.” She refused to answer when life began, but stuck to her pro-abortion points. Emphasis added:
SCHULTZ: So, from my perspective, from my party’s perspective, we do not support rolling back the protection that the constitutional right to make your own reproductive choices established in Roe v. Wade has given to women. And republicans like Rand Paul did.
This “constitutional right” to have one’s own preborn child killed is not in the Constitution. It is judicial overreach, based on a “penumbra” or feeling that privacy rights extend to the right to abort a child. And, with how abortion supporters put it, Paul is “rolling back [a] protection,” rather than standing up for life.
After admitting that women should “certainly not on whim” have third-trimester abortions, the congresswoman still would not denounce the procedure:
SCHULTZ: We’ve been very clear. There’s no ambivalence here, we’ve been very clear. We believe that that decision is best left not to government, but between a woman and her doctor.
So, there isn’t — I can’t tell you a specific date and time past which we on all –in all cases are certain that that choice shouldn’t be made. Because that decision is very unique and individual to the woman, and should be in consultation with her conscience and her god and her doctor, that is a decision left to her…
On the April 15 episode of The Five, co-host Dana Perino addressed the issue as “protection of the innocent:”
PERINO: …Protection of the innocent is something that we have dealt with as a country, your inalienable right to live. And if you are a baby, then you don’t have — you don’t have the voice, and so you need someone to protect you….
For the first time, you really saw Debbie Wasserman Schultz grilled by Megyn Kelly. And I think that is a great service for the upcoming debate because it’s one about the protection of the innocent, one that is — it’s important for us. It’s bigger than Social Security reform or tax reform or even national security. Protection of the innocent should be a platform that we talk about in 2016.
Headshot of Bret Baier, host of Special Report.
Abortion was also discussed on the April 16 episode of “Special Report” with Bret Baier. A.B. Stoddard from The Hill, Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard, and Charles Krauthammer, a contributor for Fox News, discussed late-term abortion as an issue opponents can win on, especially with Paul “refram[ing] the issue.”
Stoddard and Krauthammer also referred to young people. Stoddard affirms:
The Millennial voter is pro-life, increasingly. In a discussion that tries to galvanize young people, it may become more of the debate than it has been in recent cycles…
We can hope that as young people are catered to and become more involved in the political process, abortion will finally become an important issue.
