In a new interview, failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis tells Mic reporter Elizabeth Plank that she aborted her second child “out of love.”
“I discovered that my daughter was suffering from an irreparable and non-life sustaining brain deformation or malformation,” Davis says of her abortion. “It was one of the most heart-wrenching decisions I’ve ever had to make, and I made my decision out of love.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6RESGZAyQ&w=560&h=315]
Davis, a state senator who gained notoriety by filibustering a ban on late-term abortion, went on to declare abortion a “personal issue” and say, “the idea that a politician would step into that decision for me and displace my ability to do out of love what I knew was right for a daughter that I wanted very much is not only insulting, it’s disgusting.”
In the video, Plank also interviews several attendees of a pro-life convention, and attempts to paint them as hypocrites for calling abortion murder yet refusing to call women who have abortions murderers: “The way they view a woman who has had an abortion is very different than how they would view a woman who hires a hit on her own child […] Not everyone believes this is a reasonable leap in logic.”
“Abortion isn’t murder,” she concludes. “They’re two different things.” However, Live Action News and other pro-life leaders have contradicted this argument in multiple commentaries. The commentaries argue that it is consistent to view abortion as murder, even while taking into account that women are subject to widespread cultural misinformation. Such misinformation has deceived abortion seekers and other women into believing their child was not alive at conception or when the abortion was performed.
In a 2007 National Review article, Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said that “while the position [that abortion is murder without calling women murderers] may be counterintuitive to some, it is clearly a… case of handling a delicate and tragic situation with sensitivity,” and Radford University political scientist Matthew Franck wrote:
Consciousness of abortion’s wrongness will not be rebuilt overnight. It is plausible that we could begin by reducing the number of abortions in America by 90 percent with zero jail time for any woman who obtains one. In a more just society a generation or two after Roe, further reductions might require stronger laws. But by then, such laws would once again be tolerable and recognized as just. Which is to say, the law must be prudent, not the product of sophomore logic.
