More than 300,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, with thousands more passing every day. And yet Mike Pence—the man who was put in charge of heading up the task force that allowed so many people to die and millions more to become sick—thought this would be a good time to host an event congratulating himself and Donald Trump for everything they’ve done to preserve “life.”
CBS News reporter Kate Smith posted a screenshot of a press release to Twitter, announcing Pence’s plan to hold an obtusely-named “life is winning” event to celebrate Trump’s commitment to denying people their reproductive freedoms.
Taking opinions out of it, the VP holding a “Life is Winning” event while literally thousands of Americans are dying every single day from the virus seems incredibly tone deaf. pic.twitter.com/2SlI3GqrbB
— Kate Smith (@byKateSmith) December 14, 2020
In that statement, Pence touts Trump’s “accomplishments” in the area of denying people access to reproductive healthcare, like appointing anti-choice judges and “signing an executive order protecting infants born alive,” even though those protections already exist. Because “infant born alive” is just another term for “human person” and those protections are called “existing laws against murder.”
As Smith notes in a follow-up tweet, Pence isn’t wrong about Trump being “the most Pro-Life president ever,” if by “life,” you mean “birth” because again, with those 300,000 people having died during this pandemic, you have to be focused on a very specific kind of “life” right now to think it’s “winning.”
The GOP has always made it clear that they don’t actually care about “life.” If they did, they would support universal access to healthcare, free childcare, a higher minimum wage, and anything and everything else that can make the act of having and raising a child more feasible. But their vision of life ends at birth. That’s always been true but it might never have been so clear as in declaring “life is winning” while actively ignoring this many dead and dying people.
I cannot think of a more insensitive, out-of-touch statement a person, let alone a purported leader in charge of such a failed pandemic response, could make right now.
(via Kate Smith on Twitter, image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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