OPINION
Ben Terangi
Ben Terangi is a freelance journalist writing from Milwaukee.
While the media was busy taking Trump out of context to claim he called for a violent “bloodbath” if he loses November’s election, Vice President Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail giving aid and comfort to the for-profit peddlers of a literal bloodbath.
Last Thursday, President Biden’s wingwoman toured a Planned Parenthood clinic in St Paul, Minnesota — a visit the BBC boasted was a first for any US president or vice president.
Her tour came less than a week after Joe Biden verballed his opponents during a fiery State of the Union address.
“Many of you in this chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom,” he charged. “My God, what freedoms will you take away next?”
Alas, the president doth protest too much. Despite the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, just shy of one million unborn American babies were aborted last year. And it’s a number the Biden-Harris outfit evidently hopes to see increase.
Ms Harris has vowed to make abortion “rights” a defining issue of this year’s election. She undertook the abortion mill tour as part of her euphemistically-named ‘Fight for Reproductive Rights’ campaign, launched in December.
Minnesota, her state stopover of choice, has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the US — including no ban or limit on abortion regardless of how far along a pregnancy is and no requirement of parental involvement for girls younger than 18 years of age.
“Right now, in our country, we are facing a very serious health crisis,” she said during her speech at the premises, appropriately located in an industrial area. “And the crisis is affecting many, many people in our country, most of whom are, frankly, silently suffering.”
The truth is, of course, quite the opposite. The real health crisis is abortion, which by design ends the life of a silently suffering human being in 100 per cent of successful cases.
“In states around our country, extremists have proposed and passed laws that have denied women access to reproductive healthcare,” she continued.
Only in upside-down land can those seeking to save lives be painted as “extremists”, and industrialised death be called “healthcare” — yet this is the world Ms Harris inhabits.
“Please do understand that when we talk about a clinic such as this, it is absolutely about healthcare and reproductive healthcare,” she added.
What was that Goebbels line about repeating a lie until people believe it?
The Veep then listed some of the “essential” services provided by Planned Parenthood, including breast cancer screenings, contraception, and, in her words, “abortion care”. Ever notice how adding the suffix “care” mystically alleviates the moral nightmare of the whole enterprise?
In closing, Ms Harris remarked that “attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous and, in many instances, just plain old immoral”.
Never mind that the decisions being made concern the body of another — a tiny, precious, little life with its own unique DNA, brainwaves, heartbeat, sensory inputs and developmental pathway.
Even so, to the Vice Prez, ending that fragile, helpless life is an “individual’s right”, while placing any limits on the killings is “just plain old immoral”.
One might have hoped that by 2024, the world’s most powerful administration would have come up with an argument or two for abortion, rather than relying on euphemisms, denials of scientific fact, smears, accusations and outright inversions of the truth.
The fact that Ms Harris had no such argument on offer during her illustrious abortion mill tour strongly suggests that none exist.
Along with the very best abortion apologists, Ms Harris wins the debate by simply averting her gaze from the undeniable: every foetus is a human being, and every abortion destroys a human life.
Applause is easy to garner by singing the praises of abortion in a Planned Parenthood facility.
As for convincing voters that it’s a winning issue? That’s another question entirely. In a recent Pew poll, abortion featured precisely nowhere when Americans were asked about their top policy priorities for 2024.
And I guarantee the unborn aren’t impressed by it either.
After reading Ben Terangi’s critique, what do Kamala Harris and the Biden Administration stand for? Tell us in the comments below.