During his show, “Morning Joe,” on Tuesday, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough discussed abortion and pro-life laws with co-host and wife Mika Brzezinski. In addition to making a generalized statement about pro-lifers, they argued that the overturning of Roe v. Wade pushed more Americans to support the killing of preborn children.
Abortion is a life-and-death issue
“Support for abortion was always there, and it was growing over the past decade,” said Brzezinski. “I think, since the overturning of Roe, it has crystalized the issue for anybody who was on the fence about it, or didn’t feel they had, any men, perhaps, who didn’t feel as connected with it.”
She added, perhaps unaware of the irony, “Now, we are seeing the consequences of these rights being taken away. Fifty years of rights that our daughters and sons, as families, don’t have. And, they’re brutal; they’re very specific. They’re a matter of life and death.”
Brzezinski’s right, in a sense. The abortion debate is “a matter of life and death.” But while pregnancy is a normal function of the female body — not a disease to be cured — abortion is an abnormal act of violence which forces the end of a pregnancy by directly and intentionally killing the child in the womb. Parents are wired to protect their children, but the culture has turned preborn children into the ultimate enemy of women’s empowerment.
The abortion debate is about those lives and those deaths and whether or not one person (the mother) can have the right to have another person (her innocent child) killed for any reason she deems sufficient. Spoiler alert: There is no such “right.”
Easy being pro-life
Scarborough agreed with Brzezinski that anyone who was “on the fence” about abortion is now leaning more pro-abortion following the overturn of Roe. He said, “There are so many people that now are, are — that were pro-life before Dobbs — that now understand the importance of Roe because of the radicalism in the states.” He added, “I always, you know, it cost me nothing to just take the position, yeah, yeah, I’m pro-life, and da-da-da, because there was the right there [via Roe].”
He added, “[T]here are a lot of people, […] there are a lot of people who, who have really been transformed by the radicalism of the last three, four years.”
He claimed that it was easy to be pro-life under Roe because personal opinions didn’t matter and the so-called ‘right’ to abortion existed despite anyone’s pro-life beliefs. So if a pro-life woman did experience an unwanted pregnancy, she could still abort despite that belief. Scarborough believes that people who were self-proclaimed pro-lifers became pro-abortion after Roe fell because that false ‘right’ was lost and now they had to face the music, so to speak. But he’s wrong.
Just shy of a year after the fall of Roe, a Gallup poll revealed that 41% of Americans identify as pro-life, an increase of four percentage points from the year prior — before Roe fell. And the number of Americans who believe abortion is “morally wrong” also rose from 38% to 41%.
Protecting preborn human beings from violent deaths by dismemberment and cardiac arrest is not a “radical” act.
Pro-life laws that have been passed in numerous states since the fall of Roe seek to end the brutal violence of abortion and protect innocent children. That’s not extreme; it should be the expectation that the American government protects the vulnerable and the innocent.
Pro-lifers are “old, white, fat men’
Scarborough continued, “And I must say, this is post-Dobbs, you look and you see the radicalism of — I’ll just say it — these old, white, fat men in Mississippi or somewhere else that, that are driving women out of, out of, out of medical care. Because they want to appeal to the most extreme elements of their base.”
This is a completely inaccurate and biased assessment of the pro-life movement in the United States. Gallup polling shows that in 2023, while 45% of women believe abortion should be legal under only certain circumstances, the same is true of 59% of men. Fifteen percent (15%) of women believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances compared to 12% of men.
Just analyzing the pro-life leaders in America makes it clear. Most pro-life organizations in the nation are run by women — many of them young women. From Live Action founder and president Lila Rose to the founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising Terrisa Bukovinac, women are leading the fight to end abortion. Students for Life of America is headed by Kristan Hawkins and National Right to Life is led by Carol Tobias.
There are also pro-life women in legislatures at both the federal and state levels. In 2020, 16 pro-life women were elected to Congress, and there are even pro-life female governors.
But Scarborough and Brzezinski, like most faces in pro-abortion media, want to convince Americans who are on the fence about abortion — and even those who are adamantly pro-life — that they are in the minority. Their goal is to make pro-lifers, especially female pro-lifers, feel alone in the pro-life stance to the point that they may even feel bad about it and be guilted into changing their minds and becoming pro-abortion or ‘personally pro-life.’ (It’s a similar psychological tactic used during certain other recent events, in which the media “othered” and outright bullied people who believed something different than the mainstream narrative at the time.)
The truth is, the landscape is changing. Abortion is being exposed for the horrific act of killing that it is, and with education and knowledge more Americans will become pro-life, and eventually, abortion will be unthinkable.
