The Blatant Lie Behind The Senate Vote To "Codify Roe"

How zealous the Democrats have become in the name of the abortion regime

You have by now probably heard that the U.S. Senate today intends to take a vote to “codify Roe”, a step favored by many abortion supporters. You may also be surprised to learn that this effort is not backed by pro-abortion Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, or indeed any of the other Republicans who are squishy on the abortion issue, or even by West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin. Why is this? Shouldn’t this be an easy vote for them if, as so many in the media have claimed in the past week, the voters are solidly on the side of keeping Roe as the law of the land?

The answer, of course, is that this bill goes way further than codifying Roe — instead, it represents an unconstitutional power grab which ignores the 10th Amendment and strikes down state restrictions even allowed under the Roe and Casey regime.

National Review correspondent John McCormack’s Twitter thread, which I shared here, has the details:

Ben Domenech @bdomenech

Today's vote is not to "codify Roe". It's something far more extreme - striking down parental consent and waiting periods, laws against sex-selective abortions, and require taxpayer funding of elective abortions. By the standards of today's Democrats, Roe doesn't go far enough.

John McCormack @McCormackJohn

Four key parts of the abortion bill Schumer will bring up for a vote next week: https://t.co/A94HUy6x4b 1. How it creates a right to abortion through 9 months of pregnancy in all 50 states: https://t.co/LPpHOnuRLK

The Daily Signal has more. It’s a testament to how radical the Democratic Party has become that Roe itself is out of step with their priorities, which will allow for no conscience exemptions, no barrier to taxpayer funding, indeed no restrictions whatsoever. The right to abortion has become a right to a dead baby, by any means necessary and paid for by you. Even Bob Casey, the purportedly pro-life Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania, has been forced to go along with this charade. That’s how powerful the pro-abortion lobby is within the Democratic coalition.

So overwhelming are the priorities of this Party of Death, it even leads people who have nothing to do with the abortion issue into saying outrageous things. In an obviously orchestrated event yesterday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had the audacity to say that banning abortion would be potentially “devastating” to the economy. In response to questioning from Republican Tim Scott, she said: “This is not harsh, this is the truth.”

Dylan Housman @Dylan_Housman

And here's Yellen explaining to @SenatorTimScott, the black son of a single mother who grew up in poverty, that it's especially important for black women to have abortion access because they are often poor. Scott responds powerfully: "I am thankful to be here as a U.S. Senator"

The New York Sun editorializes here:

We understand that Secretary Yellen made her claim in answer to a question from Senator Menendez of the Banking Committee. While giving her answer, though, she appeared, at least to us, to be glancing at notes prepared in advance. This as she suggested that “eliminating the right of women to make decisions about whether and when to have children” would have “very damaging effects on the economy.” That is, the question was a set up.

Either way, it was a disgraceful performance. It would be nice to see the Republicans on the Banking Committee dig down into the statistics to discover the relationship between national population growth and national prosperity. We say that as a veteran of years of foreign corresponding in the Third World, where the leftist ideology was that population growth is bad for developing nations (never mind developed lands).

This crackpot idea was launched, in part, by Robert Strange McNamara, when he emerged as president of the World Bank. Its main result was horrifying policies designed to control population growth, with, say, one-child policies in China and onerous population control measures in India — and often with catastrophic consequences that had not been anticipated by the noble comrades. 

Ross Douthat has written eloquently about the victims of sex-selective abortions.  One piece headlined “160 Million and Counting” referred to the toll of “missing” girls as a result of these procedures in countries like India, China, Korea, and even America. Mr. Douthat’s column came 20 years after Amartya Sen’s essay about sex selection and infanticide titled “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.”

In China, the ban on more than one child per family “reduced Chinese birthrates to well below the level needed to ensure a stable population,” the Washington Post recently observed. A recent scramble by the regime to turn back the policy has failed to yield higher birthrates, and demographers say China’s population will begin falling within five years — a dramatic reversal for what has long been the world’s largest nation.

It is not our intention here to suggest that abortion rights are the cause of our population crisis. It is merely to suggest that abortion is no boon for any economy. The years of Roe have brought us to a moment when our own Census bureau is  reporting that the country’s population “grew at a slower rate in 2021 than in any other year since the founding of the nation.” It was, at 0.1%, perilously close to zero population growth.

Or even a decline. That should be seen as a warning for anyone worried about the future of our economy. A growing population supplies the workforce America will need to compete in the global economy. And to pay for the social programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, that liberals insist will be needed as baby boomers retire. Any Treasury Secretary worth his — or her — salt knows better. 

Jason Riley notes the racial disparity involved:

When it comes to abortion, however, left-wing concern seems to stop at making the procedure safe and legal, even while black-white disparities have not only persisted but widened. A 2020 paper by public-health scholar James Studnicki and two co-authors cites data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to note that the black abortion rate is nearly four times higher than the white rate: “Between 2007-2016, the Black rate declined 29% and the White rate declined 33%—meaning that the racial disparity actually increased rather than decreased.” Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in a 2019 abortion case observed that “there are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.”

Mr. Studnicki and his co-authors likewise conclude that abortion’s impact on the size of the black population is pronounced. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, they note that in 2018 there were about 61,000 premature white deaths from all causes and 21,000 premature black deaths. “Abortions were 23.9% of the White deaths and 62.7% of the Black deaths.”

Nationally, the number of babies aborted by black women each year far exceeds the combined number of blacks who drop out of school, who are sent to prison and who are murdered. Pro-choice activists typically dismiss these facts as a function of poverty, since lower-income women are more likely to get abortions and black women are more likely to have lower incomes. But even among other lower-income groups, such as Hispanics, black women still abort at significantly higher rates.