Did Hillary Clinton Say You Can Kill a Baby the Day of It's Birth?

Story highlights

• Issac Bailey: Conservative Christians distort Clinton's abortion position to requite embrace to their support of morally compromised Trump
• He says abortion has fallen in Obama tenure; Clinton's views on ballgame reverberate those of most Americans: they should be safe, rare

Issac Bailey has been a journalist in S Carolina for two decades and was most recently the primary columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Embankment. He was a 2014 Harvard Academy Nieman fellow. Follow him on Twitter: @ijbailey. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN)Hillary Clinton does not desire to impale all the little babies. She doesn't sanction the murder of the caught. Notwithstanding to hear bourgeois Christians who keep supporting Donald Trump tell it, they have no option because Clinton is supposedly a threat to the unborn and doesn't value life.

"Considering based on what she is saying, and based on where she's going and where she's been, yous tin can take a baby and rip the baby out of the womb. In the ninth month, on the last mean solar day and that'due south non acceptable," Trump roared during the final presidential argue, surely speaking directly to pro-lifers who might exist skittish about him but won't even consider Clinton because of ballgame.

Some fifty-fifty complained that during the subsequent Alfred E. Smith dinner, the archbishop of the Diocese of New York was caught "laughing and joking with Hillary Clinton less than twenty-four hours afterward Hillary announced she supports abortion upwards to the moment of birth."

First, she appear no such thing. It's nonsense.

But this denunciation of Clinton, and back up of Trump over the ballgame issue, is a fig leaf many conservatives are using to hibernate their hypocrisy.

Recall that this is a group of people who have long claimed that character matters, that they are guided by a college power in everything they exercise and think, including their politics.

And yet Trump has bragged about casually sexually assaulting women, an action (allegedly) confirmed past a growing listing of victims. He has been buoyed to the peak of GOP politics on a bigoted tide of birtherism. And in business he has repeatedly taken reward of "the to the lowest degree of these" instead of helping them.

And then the merely way conservatives can back a man similar Trump is by advancing the applesauce that each candidate is as flawed -- but only with 1 (Trump) would they have a gamble at saving the piddling babies. They believe the falsehood about Clinton, pushed by Ted Cruz during the primary season, that she is in favor of unlimited abortion on need "up until the moment of birth."

Clinton is a pro-pick Christian Democrat who supports a ban on partial birth ballgame -- if it comes with exceptions concerning the wellness of the female parent. That'due south why she opposed the 2003 late-term abortion ban, considering it didn't. (Just about 0.2 percent of all abortions involve the and then-called dilation and extraction procedure, and mostly because of health concerns concerning the woman or fetus.)

Clinton is on record declaring that she wants abortions to exist safe merely rare and decisions virtually them left to women and their doctors, not politicians. The policies she supports, including more comprehensive health care and wellness teaching, are among the reasons the abortion rate is at a historic low and could fall further if they are expanded -- something Clinton wants to practise.

That the rate of abortion has been going downwardly under this Autonomous presidency, and that there is scant evidence that having a Republican in the White Firm would brand it rarer, seems to thing petty to conservative Christians, also many of whom are quick to label anyone "infant killer" or "pro-abortion" for having the temerity to not see the world in the blackness-and-white terms they practise.

The irony, of course, is that when pressed, they are quick to acknowledge the obvious: The issue is complex, which is why so many anti-abortion groups spoke upwardly when Trump said that women who have abortions, if they are fabricated illegal, would demand to be punished, forcing Trump to analyze and back off.

They empathize with women who even have to consider aborting a fetus, they say, which is why it would make little sense to abort and imprison whatever woman who does (though in a mail Roe five. Wade world, they wouldn't mind punishing the md).

They say this while not appearing to recognize that such a stance proves that a 2-week-old fetus is non the same, legally speaking, equally a two-week-old infant. No one would alibi a mother of a two-week-old for killing her child, even if she handed off the act to a md, each of whom would be arrested and charged with murder.

Agreement that a developing fetus is a developing homo being, somewhere within the various stages between conception and nativity, is not anti-life. Neither is having personal principles that say you would never sanction an abortion in your own life, but remain leery of governmental overreach into the lives of others.

Conservatives' distortion of the pro-choice view held by many Democratic candidates helps explain how a human being like Trump could brand such inroads into a party that has long believed itself to be most family values. Misrepresenting the positions of political opponents does non seem to problem conservative Christians when it is done in the name of being pro-life.

In truth, Clinton'south views on abortion are every bit complex every bit those of about Americans. Why? Considering many Americans who don't like abortion feel it is a span besides far to essentially turn over the body of a pregnant woman to the government for 9 months, and that medical procedures are better left to the woman, her family and her doctor. That'due south not being pro-abortion; that'due south being pro-private rights, something conservatives say they treasure except, apparently, when information technology comes to a woman and her body.

They may not know it, but those conservative Christians who continue to dorsum Trump have sent messages that morality is contingent non upon right and wrong but upon whether you back the correct political political party; that adultery tin be explained away; that lying nearly those with whom you disagree is perfectly fine; and that neither sexual assault nor open bigotry is reason to not back up a candidate.

Maybe in this calculation God should exist written with a pocket-size "thousand" because a god whose image can exist used to support one'due south every politically expedient position -- even if that position flouts 1's stated religious principles -- isn't a god to be worshiped, but rather one to be pitied.

This ballot cycle has been heavy and ugly in many ways. But it has also been revealing, showing that maybe Republicans shouldn't exist and then quick to declare their positions correct in the proper noun of God and that Democrats should be less afraid of explaining their own religion positions.

atkinsfornow1965.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/25/opinions/conservatives-use-clinton-and-abortion-to-hide-hypocrisy-bailey/index.html