First lady Jill Biden has teamed up with singer Christina Aguilera to promote more abortion access across the United States.
In a joint message shared on social media, Biden and Aguilera used fear-mongering and inflammatory language to claim that laws protecting preborn children in the womb have stripped women of their rights.
Hyperbole and propaganda
“It was shocking and devastating. From state to state, abortion bans went into effect, threatening the health and lives of women across the country,” Biden said of the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
“While also threatening doctors with prosecution for simply doing their jobs,” Aguilera continued.
“And now, extremists are even threatening the right to access IVF and contraception for so many families,” Biden claimed. In actuality, a recent Alabama Supreme Court decision simply stated that under that state’s wrongful death act, families had legal recourse if their preborn children created by IVF (who were, under that statute, to be treated as human beings) were destroyed without their permission. The court decision did not change any law with regard to whether or not IVF would be allowed, and in fact, the state legislature quickly passed another law protecting IVF, which the Republican governor signed immediately.
In other words, IVF and contraception are not actually under threat — but of course, this ad doesn’t have to prove any of its claims. It simply disseminates propaganda.
Text on the screen in the ad also claimed that abortion restrictions threaten to “rip away” the fundamental rights of women across the country. Interestingly enough, what the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade, is that the Constitution has never supported a ‘right’ to abortion, adding that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start,” just as the Dobbs decision states on page 65 (emphasis added):
We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives… procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our Nation’s history.
“Secrecy, shame, punishment, danger, even death,” the first lady said. “Extremists are working harder than ever to drag us back to a past we thought was long over. We should have the freedom to make our decisions about our bodies.” But only someone who ignores and denies nearly 500 known legal abortion deaths from 1973-2020, and does the same regarding the very real existence of post-abortion trauma, could make the claim that these abortion-related things are “long over.”
What should a nation’s laws do?
“I will not let my daughter live in a world where politicians make decisions about her body,” Aguilera added, apparently unaware that laws that are passed in this country (laws regarding drinking and driving or seat belt usage, laws regulating the use and ownership of weaponry or ammunition, laws regarding the age one must be before one can legally have sex or consume alcohol, drive a vehicle, vote, or serve in the armed forces… the list goes on) — whether these laws are about abortion or not — affect what people can or cannot do with their bodies. And laws against the killing of other human beings are meant to protect human life.
Laws that are passed to allow or promote the killing of innocent human beings are unjust laws.
On page 32 of the Dobbs decision, the idea of bodily autonomy with regard to killing preborn children by abortion is addressed, with SCOTUS accurately noting:
These attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s ‘concept of existence’ prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.
Despite the inflammatory claims in the ad, abortion restrictions have not threatened the lives of women. Every day, more than 2,500 preborn lives are lost in the United States because of abortions, with only a tiny percentage done for reasons of threat to the life of the mother. Pro-life laws seek to protect these innocent children – not threaten lives.
Abortion advocates routinely use the phrase “my body, my choice” to signal their support for abortion, but the preborn child’s body does not belong to his or her mother. The preborn child is a distinct human being, with his or her own DNA, a heart that beats independently of his or her mother’s, and limbs that are growing and forming within the womb.
No one has a legitimate right to kill another innocent human being – not even if that human being is temporarily living within her.
Pro-lifers don’t advocate for shame, punishment, or death; instead, they simply work toward one common goal – the equal protection of innocent human beings who are routinely slaughtered in the womb. Such killing is never a right – it’s a tragedy.
