In a speech at Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Michigan rally on Saturday, former First Lady Michelle Obama urged men to vote for Vice President Harris so that the ‘women they love won’t die during childbirth.’
Obama began the abortion portion of her speech with a guilt trip, telling men they don’t love women if they don’t support abortion. “Please do not put… our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men who have no clue or do not care what we as women are going through,” she added.
Essentially, Obama is claiming that male politicians are incapable of understanding anything about why women might ‘need’ to kill their preborn babies, and is calling upon other men to be less ‘clueless’. Because apparently, if you realize that a woman is pregnant with a human being, and that human being also has value — well, then you just don’t care about women or what they “are going through.”
It was a speech laced with complete lies and propaganda meant to scare and pressure men into voting for Harris. In the speech, Obama hammered on some very big falsehoods:
- Michelle Obama claimed that women are in “legal jeopardy” because of pro-life laws, when no current pro-life law enacts any penalty whatsoever upon the woman.
- Obama insinuated that without abortion providers, women won’t be able to get Pap smears or proper miscarriage care.
- She claimed that unplanned pregnancies will prevent young men from attending college, indirectly encouraging more abortion coercion.
- She claimed that women will die in childbirth if doctors can’t do abortions.
Lie 1: Women will be in “legal jeopardy” if states have pro-life laws.
“So to the men who love us,” said Obama, “let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women and how it would affect every single woman in your life. Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out of state or overseas or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up.”
Induced abortion — the deliberate killing of a preborn baby — is not ‘basic health care.’ It does not treat any health conditions or diseases and will not save a woman’s life during a medical emergency. An induced abortion is very different from an induced delivery. In both, the pregnancy is ended, but in the abortion the baby’s death is intended.
I have chills from this poignant message to men from @MichelleObama: attacks on our reproductive health not only hurt the people we love, but you too. https://t.co/WUbH7tg6jk
— Alexis McGill Johnson (@alexismcgill) October 27, 2024
In addition, a woman would not be in “legal jeopardy” for crossing state lines to have an abortion or ordering the abortion pill online because current pro-life laws do not include prosecution or punishment for women who have an abortion or carry out a DIY abortion by pill.
Selling the abortion pill online has been a long-time goal of the abortion industry. By selling the abortion pill to women over the internet despite the known risks and dangers, abortion advocates can then blame pro-life laws when a woman experiencing known complications of the abortion pill is too scared to call the doctor, because abortion advocates have lied and told her she could be arrested. Then, she unnecessarily risks her life to keep her abortion secret. This appears to be what happened to Candi Miller.
Lie #2: Women won’t get Pap smears or good miscarriage care unless they can have abortions.
Obama continued, “Your wife or mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care. Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy. Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away.”
So many lies in just three sentences… Are we to believe that abortion providers are the main providers of regular gynecological care? They’re not. Even before the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision allowed states to set their own abortion laws, industry leader Planned Parenthood only served 3% of women of reproductive age in the U.S. Services like cancer screenings have been declining there for two decades. Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report for 2022-23 showed that its total cancer screenings (that includes Pap tests for cervical cancer) have dropped 79% since their high in 2004.
Pro-life laws may cause abortion-focused businesses to shut down, but valid health care centers such as FQHCs remain open. However, there has been a growing shortage of obstetricians and gynecologists (and health care workers overall) that began before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Hospitals have been shutting down their maternity units due to a shrinking birth rate, forcing women to travel further to give birth.
In addition, not all emergency rooms or urgent care centers are trained in miscarriage care and most will send a woman home to miscarry naturally unless she needs immediate, emergency care. Surgical intervention — such as a D&C to remove the remains after a miscarriage (a procedure that can also used to intentionally kill children via induced abortion) — is typically a last resort when a miscarriage fails to complete on its own (“missed miscarriage). Other methods (such as prescribing a drug) are likely to be tried first. These interventions are both completely legal to use in treatment for a miscarriage.
Lie 3: ‘Your sons won’t be able to go to college’ if women don’t get abortions.
“And this will not just affect women. It will affect you and your sons,” said Obama. “The devastating consequences of teen pregnancy won’t just be born by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They too will have their dreams of going to college; their entire future is totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy.” Here, Obama sounds much like her husband, when he made his infamous statement about the need to teach teens about contraception so they’re not “punished with a baby.”
This lie — that a child “will ruin your life” — is the same lie that’s been told to teenage girls for decades. Elon Musk was right when he said the educational system has terrified girls into believing that if they get pregnant, their life is over. Young women have been told that their children are obstacles to achieving their dreams and goals, and that mothers are incapable of finding educational and career success.
Obama is indirectly encouraging teenage boys and their parents to pressure teenage girls into traumatic abortions so that the boy can live his dreams at the expense of his child’s life and his partner’s emotional stability. Girls who have abortions have reported being unable to complete college because of their abortion trauma.
Abortion coercion is a serious enough problem already. We certainly don’t need Mrs. Obama encouraging it.
In the decades prior to Roe, girls got pregnant out of wedlock; this isn’t new. Prior to being allowed to simply kill their children, the young parents might have 1) married and raised a baby together, 2) allowed the grandparents to raise that baby, or 3) allowed the baby to be adopted by another family. Today, marriage and adoption are still valid options for teens and young adults who experience unplanned pregnancies. The only one who would definitely have his or her “entire future… totally upended” is the preborn child who is aborted.
While responsibility for a child should fall to both parents, that doesn’t mean they should see the child they created as the enemy and kill her for existing through no fault of her own. Instead of pushing for abortion, it would benefit society to begin once again to realize that sex is for adults who are married to each other. Sex carries weight; it can create a new human life. It is not a simple recreation in which “consent” is the only thing that matters.
The problem is, “just kill it” has been presented as the “easiest option” for so long that entire generations have forgotten the weight and responsibility of sex, which God gave to humanity as a gift to be enjoyed in marriage, with the added blessing of creating families.
Comprehensive sex education has been in schools for decades — much of it from Planned Parenthood and its allies — and yet, somehow, our society came to rely on abortion as a “backup” for the various methods of contraception they learned about in school… that was supposed to be foolproof.
It seems the days of abortion as a ‘a women’s issue’ or ‘the woman’s decision’ are over for abortion advocates, and now they are begging men to stand up and speak after being told for decades to sit down and shut up.
Lie 4: ‘Women will die during childbirth without abortion.’
Obama continued, telling the men:
If you and your partner are expecting a child, you will be right by her side at the checkup, terrified if her blood pressure is too high or if there’s an issue with the placenta or if the ultrasound shows that the embryo was implanted in the wrong place and the doctors aren’t sure that they can intervene to keep the woman you love safe. If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection has spread and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late.
You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody to do something and then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral. You might be the one left to raise your children alone. See these are just some of ways women die during childbirth and I don’t want to be a downer ya’ll, but in many cases, there is no warning and things go bad very quickly.
And when it happens, every second of hesitation or delay can lead to devastating outcomes. So I am asking y’all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously.
Obama cannot reasonably blame every maternal death on whether abortion is or is not legal. This is fear-mongering and has nothing to do with pro-life laws. Treating/removing ectopic pregnancies isn’t restricted by pro-life laws. Intentionally killing a child via induced abortion in a life-threatening medical emergency like sepsis isn’t even restricted by pro-life laws. And for women who have died as a result of difficult situations, it appears upon further examination that those situations had nothing to do with pro-life laws and everything to do with negligent doctors.
Instead of blaming pro-life laws, isn’t it reasonable to expect that every doctor would be aware of the laws of his or her own state as relevant to his or her medical practice?
Abortion was fully legal for 49 years and restricted after viability in many states during that time, and pro-life laws allow for abortion through 40 weeks in cases of a threat to the mother’s life. Yet, in 2017 — long before the Dobbs decision — the U.S. was one of only two countries to report a significant increase in its maternal mortality ratio.
Every case in which a woman has claimed that “pro-life laws” prevented her from getting the care she needed should be heavily scrutinized, and many have been debunked, because actively killing a preborn child through induced abortion is not medically necessary. Early delivery of the child might be necessary but deliberately killing the child before delivery is not.
In addition, abortion advocates in the political arena have continuously claimed that they don’t want abortion legal until birth and that abortion during labor and delivery would never happen. However, it sounds as if Obama is promoting that very act — killing a child while the mother is in labor and delivery!
The doctor’s hands are not tied if “things go bad very quickly” during labor. He can perform any procedure necessary. The only thing he can’t do — and has no need to do — is deliberately cause the child to die. Preterm deliveries and emergency C-sections are not abortions because delivering a baby is not an abortion if the intent is not to cause the child’s death.
Regardless, according to Obama, you’re going to wish your child had been aborted so you don’t have to raise him or her “alone.”
Injecting the child with a feticide to stop her heart, or ripping her limbs off of her body — those are steps involved in an abortion and there is no logical reason to do that during labor or even preterm labor.
