By Ruth Moreno and Connor Semelsberger
As the debates over Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation to the Supreme Court come to a close following Sunday's successful cloture vote advancing Barrett's confirmation in the Senate, Democrats are using their final hours on the Senate floor to push a radical pro-abortion agenda. Convinced that Barrett will overturn Roe v. Wade if given the opportunity, Senate Democrats have turned what is supposed to be an apolitical process into a blatantly partisan debate over abortion.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) delivered what was probably supposed to be a heartfelt speech on the Senate floor about Heidi Peters, the wife of Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who had a late-term abortion in the 1980s. Heidi wanted her child until she discovered four months into her pregnancy that her child had a life-threatening fetal deformity. When the expected miscarriage did not arrive, Heidi's health deteriorated until she obtained an abortion which may have saved her life.
Quoting Peters, Warren said these events "enacted an incredible emotional toil," and went on to explain why the confirmation of Barrett, which might lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, would endanger women like Heidi. "The right to make such decisions as a family, free of politics, has never been more at stake," Warren told the Senate.
Peters' and his wife's story is undeniably sad. The couple has suffered greatly and deserves the compassion of all good-hearted Americans. However, Warren conflates two very different kinds of abortions when telling their story: those due to fetal deformity and those which save the life of the mother. The former are discriminatory and tell a child with a disability they are unwanted, while the latter are legal and much less controversial.
The reality is, few are currently seeking to ban abortions which are necessary to save a mother's life, and such abortions are exceedingly rare, anyway. Elective late-term abortions, however, are not, despite the fact that they are very unpopular among Americans.
Warren was not alone in trying to push the Democratic Party's radical abortion agenda. Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) applauded her party's transformation of judicial hearings into debates over abortion. In clear violation of the spirit of the Constitution, the Democratic Party has been politicizing the judicial branch, which is supposed to be nonpartisan, for decades. According to Hirono, fifty years ago, Patsy Mink made "women's rights" a key issue in a Supreme Court nomination when she testified against the nomination of Judge v. Harold Carswell in 1970. Mink called into question Carswell's record on the equality of the sexes, which, as Hirono said, "paved the way for President Richard Nixon to appoint Justice Harry Blackmun to the Court."
"Three years later," Hirono told the Senate, "Justice Blackmun wrote the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade," which she described as focusing on a woman's constitutional "right to control her own body."
Of course, when Hirono speaks of a women's right to control her own body, she is really talking about a woman's made-up right to control someone else's body -- the body of her unborn child. But Hirono, Warren, and their Democratic colleagues in Congress do not recognize the humanity of unborn children. Their obsession with abortion has never been more obvious than it is now as they continue to resist Barrett's confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Clearly, Democrats will stop at nothing to make abortion legal and accessible during all stages of pregnancy, regardless of the opinions of Americans and the benefits of keeping the Supreme Court objective. The idea that Barrett's vote on the court might overturn Roe v. Wade terrifies them, because it would bring an end to the court's stranglehold on the issue of abortion in the United States.
The politicized Supreme Court nomination process that now plagues the Senate can be traced back through decades of judicial activism. The Court has waded into social policymaking, and everyone knows it. This is why the final vote later this evening to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is so vitally important. A vote for Judge Barrett is not a vote for radical policy positions like Senate Democrats have claimed, but rather is a vote to restore the Supreme Court to its original duties to uphold the Constitution as it was originally written.
