The hosts of The View had Pete Buttigieg on the show Thursday and Meghan McCain decided to take the opportunity to push some anti-abortion propaganda.
McCain brought up a radio interview Buttigieg did recently that she says “got a lot of play in conservative media and conservative circles.” She quotes him as saying in the interview, “There’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath,” telling him “that is something we can interpret that differently.” She called his statement “pretty radical.”
Pete responded by saying “I’m just pointing to the fact that different people will interpret their own moral lights and for that matter interpret scripture differently. But we live in a country where it is extremely important that no one person have to be subjected to some other person’s interpretation of their own religion.”
McCain then interrupted him to say she was asking about “partial-birth abortion,” which is one of those phrases like “fetal heartbeat ban” and late-term abortion” that were invented by anti-abortion activists with the intention of sounding like medical terms, despite having no basis in the medical reality of abortion care.
McCain insisted Buttigieg say where his “line” is regarding abortion. His response was that “My point is it shouldn’t be up to a government official to draw the line. It should be up to the woman.”
But McCain wasn’t done with the nonsense propaganda. She then asked if he would be okay with a person choosing to “invoke infanticide after the baby was born” which is probably the most ridiculous anti-abortion talking points because if the baby has been born, it’s not abortion and we already have a word for what it is: murder. And guess what—that’s already illegal so I don’t understand the confusion.
Pete does, at least, treat McCain’s statement as the gibberish that it is. He responded by asking “Does anyone actually think that’s what these cases are about?” Unfortunately, the answer is yes. These non-medical terms have been terrifyingly effective in evoking strong emotions while eclipsing actual science. Anti-abortion groups have been succeeding in convincing large swaths of the general public that later abortions are the result of a pregnant person just casually deciding they don’t want to be pregnant anymore after, like, eight months. In reality, that’s never what these cases are about.
I’ll let Pete explain. (And his answer is so good, I’ll excuse his use of “late-term,” just this once.) Here’s what he said to McCain:
Think about the situation. If this is a late-term situation, then by definition it’s one where a woman was expecting to carry the pregnancy to term. Then she gets the most, perhaps, devastating news of her life. We’re talking about families that may have picked out a name, maybe assembling a crib and they learn something, excruciating, and are faced with this terrible choice. And I don’t know what to tell them, morally, about what they should do. I just know that I trust her, and her decision, medically or morally, isn’t going to be any better because the government is commanding her to do it.
She still didn’t get it. She rolled her eyes at the audience’s applause and said that his answer was as “radical” as she expected. Since he didn’t “back down” from his answer, she told him it was going to hurt him with “people like me.”
And yes, lots of conservative figures and anti-abortion groups are out on Twitter framing this as “Buttigieg won’t condemn infanticide!” And I’m sure tons of their followers will believe them.
But by “people like me,” I can only imagine McCain means people who were never going to listen to his thoughtful, empathetic answer in the first place and were always going vote for Trump no matter what, no matter what Buttigieg had said. So he may as well stand his ground on issues like this.
McCain has said a lot of awful things from her seat on The View but at this point, it’s just irresponsible of the show and of ABC to continue to give her this platform.
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