Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 345 | Exposing Democrats' Pro-Abortion Plans for 2021 | Guest: Alexandra DeSanctis

Episode Date: January 4, 2021

Today we're joined by Alexandra DeSanctis, a pro-life writer for National Review. She has been following the pro-abortion movement within the Democrat party and explains exactly what legislation Democrats are pushing at the state level as well as what to expect from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on abortion. -- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and a wonderful new year. So we thought that 2020 was going to end and everything would go back to normal. We've been same for the past however many months, almost a year now, like starting at the end of February. we were saying, oh, 2021 is so weird. It's, or 2020 is so weird. I can't wait until next year. I can't wait until 2020 is over.

Well, I hate to be the barrier of bad news, but 2021 doesn't necessarily guarantee us normalcy. Like, it doesn't guarantee us any stability. Things are probably going to continue to be weird. Like, that's just the age that we live in. But hey, God knew exactly what he was doing when he put the people in the place that he wanted to put them at the time that he wanted to put them. We're not here arbitrarily.

We're not here accidentally. He didn't just say, okay, I guess these people are good to be, you know, put in this generation or this spot in the span of eternity. He does everything with intention. He does everything with purpose. And so we can take comfort in the fact that he is completely sovereign over all of us. He knows every single one of our days before any of them come to be. Psalm 139.16 says he is not wondering what this year holds.

He has not been surprised or taken aback by any. so he is completely and totally in control. And we have every reason to rejoice and every reason to be confident as we have ever had. And so we can look forward to this year, knowing that things could still be weird, that could still be hard, but knowing that God is completely in control. And he is worthy of all of our hope and our praise. Okay, today we're having a very fascinating policy-centric conversation about abortion. So we talk about abortion a lot. We talk about abortion legislation, but we really talk about the underneath of abortion, like the worldview and the philosophical views that lead someone to be pro-choice, and they might say personally pro-choice,

or personally pro-life, but outwardly pro-choice, or even encourages someone to be pro-abortion because those people do actually exist. But today, we're going to focus a little bit more specifically on what's going on legislation-wise, both federally and on the state level when it comes to abortion and what the Biden administration specifically looks like when it comes to abortion advocacy. And we will get into also kind of the worldview implications and the thinking behind the pro-choice movement and the pro-choice position. I'm talking to Alexandra DeSantis. She has a writer for National Review. She is an excellent expert and an excellent resource on all of this. And I'm just really excited for you to listen to and learn from this conversation. Without further ado,

here is Alexandra DeSaintess. Alexandra, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell everyone who may not know who you are and what you do? Yes, I'm a staff writer at National Review, and I cover elections, politics, culture, and especially the pro-life movement and abortion policy. Yes, you're one of my go-to sources when it comes to breaking down legislation that has to do with abortion. So I really appreciate just the thoroughness.

of your reporting when it comes to this beep, can you tell us what is coming down the pipeline as far as federal abortion legislation goes, especially if Democrats end up taking the Senate if they win these two races in Georgia? I think the biggest thing to keep an eye on would be the Hyde Amendment. This is a long time conference protection policy that has been put in place almost always since Roe v. Wade to ensure that pro-life taxpayers and all taxpayers don't have to fund abortion procedures through Medicaid. And the Democratic Party is now taking aim at this policy. House Democrats have been having hearings. They've been pushing various amendments and bills trying to get rid of

this conscience protection. And it seems, you know, with Joe Biden having reversed himself on this issue and now also opposing the Hyde Amendment if Democrats take the Senate, this is unfortunately probably one of the first things that they would do on abortion. And can you explain a little bit more about what the Hyde Amendment is, how it came about, what exactly it protects, and why we as pro-lifers should care about it? Sure. So it was first put in place right after Roevey Wade, a couple years after the Supreme Court sort of invented this constitutional right to abortion. And it was actually backed by a really big bipartisan coalition, you know, something like 250 Democratic.

Democrats supported the first Hyde Amendment in the House in 1976. And it's been added as a rider to relevant federal budgets, essentially, to ensure that something like Medicaid money, for example, does not reimburse for abortion procedures. So unfortunately, the Hyde Amendment does not mean that abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, for example, can't get federal money. As most people know, Planned Parenthood does get about half a billion dollars in federal money every year. but Hyde is supposed to protect sort of the direct use of federal funds to underwrite or reimburse providers for abortion procedures.

And it's supposed to be a protection of essentially the pro-life Americans' conscience rights. And you said Joe Biden reversed course on that. He has been one of those Democrats that even though he considers himself pro-choice, he has at the very least said, okay, you know, we're not going to overturn the Hyde Amendment. But as that has become more mainstream and more of a posh Democratic talking point, he decided, okay, yes, we are going to overturn it. What do you think his thinking was there? I mean, was it really ideologically or values driven? Or was it just because he wanted to make sure that he won over some of the more progressive wing of the party?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because it was a very conspicuous reversal, self reversal on the topic. Biden actually for several decades as a Democrat supported the Hyde Amendment and said, you know, called himself pro-life for a long time. I think still might even consider himself, as he would put it personally pro-life as a Catholic, even though he's always backed abortion, essentially unlimited abortion. But last summer when he was running for president, he sort of went back and forth a couple times in one week. He was asked about the Hyde Amendment and he said he supported it and then he said he didn't and then he said he supported it again.

And then he finally kind of came down on the anti-Hide Amendment position. And I think it's very obvious that this was a kind of nakedly political move because, you know, the very least you would expect. even from someone who supports legal abortion is to say, look, at least we can respect pro-life taxpayers and not force them to fund this procedure. And that's what he said for a very long time. And it was clear the party was moving in a different direction. And he was afraid of being the odd man out, wanted to get the nomination. I think he felt like that was a concession he had to make to the left wing of the party. You have to give him and some other Democrats who have in the past supported the Hyde Amendment a little bit of credit for deductive reasoning. because the new talking point that has been accepted, I would say, by probably the whole Democratic Party,

that is that health care is a human right and that abortion is health care. So if health care is a human right, which what they mean by that, of course, is that it should be taxpayer funded completely. And if abortion is health care, well, then that would mean basic algebra tells us that, okay, abortion needs to be paid for by the taxpayer. And of course, they present this as this kind of social justice issue that people who are, quote, hurt by the Hyde Amendment are poor women who can't afford an abortion. But would you agree that that's all kind of just this convoluted mirage or facade? And really what's behind it is just a push to force taxpayers to fund something that we find grotesque? I think that's exactly it. And the problem is you've seen over the last couple of decades this really radical shift.

in the Democratic Party back in the 90s, people like Bill Clinton, even Hillary Clinton, were saying, you know, abortion is kind of not something anyone wants to choose, but it should be safe, it should be legal, it should be rare, because sometimes women do need to make that choice. But it wasn't something that people on the left, by and large, politicians at least celebrated. And more recently, now we're hearing this rhetoric about abortion being a social good or something that you should never say that a woman wouldn't want to choose that because it imposes some kind of stigma on the choice. And I think a huge part of that logic, like you point out, is, okay, well, now if we're going to pay for health care and abortion is health care, then we

ought to pay for abortion at the federal level and not to do so. The cover for it is, you know, not to do so harms poor women in particular or women of color or whatever the rhetoric might be. But the fact of the matter is you sort of justify or add a kind of pretty gloss to abortion when you say, if this is just like everything else, we ought to fund. Yeah. You deal with the pro-choice, pro-abortion, euphemisms all day long. You know, reproductive freedom, reproductive justice and health care.

Every kind of bit of marketing and advertising and the PR campaigns that they use that push for abortions obviously leave out who abortion is actually harming the child inside the womb. And I would say the mainstream culture has just kind of accepted this,

that abortion really can just be safe, that it's something that is a moral good, completely ignoring. the fact of what abortion is, it kills an unborn child. How do you think, in your opinion, they have become so successful in obfuscating what abortion actually is and presenting it as this just, I don't even, I don't even know, just some form of social justice that we should all applaud, this form of women's rights and liberation. How has that been so successful? You know, I think you're exactly right. And I think a huge part of it is just the sort of

stranglehold that the pro-abortion cause and movement has on the media. And that's not to say necessarily that every reporter is some kind of radical pro-abortion zealot, not necessarily. But when you go to look for information about abortion policy or what politicians believe about abortion, the top papers, the top outlets tend to be just rife with misinformation. And so the average person, you know, you don't see an article about what abortion is. You don't see an accurate article about why you need something like. like a born alive abortion survivors protection act, for instance. That information is just not present.

And democratic politicians never get asked, what is abortion? What do you believe abortion is? Why do you think it should be legal? Instead, there are all these kind of nonsense questions about, oh, what's going to happen to women after a row or, you know, kind of puff or sort of side questions that are not getting at the heart of what abortion is. And that so obviously is helpful to the people who support abortion because I suppose

you could support abortion knowing and acknowledging what it is. But that's a much more difficult thing to defend. And I actually have more, I don't even know if I would call it respect because it's obviously a position that I don't agree with. But there are some, you know, feminists in the so-called abortion movement that actually do acknowledge what abortion is and acknowledge that abortion does kill a human being, but they assert that it's an acceptable form of killing, that it is still right, that we should still allow women to do it. I say at least they're honest, but how the abortion movement has been

so successful isn't convincing people of this kind of euphemistic nonsense that abortion is no different than a root canal, that what's inside the womb is, you know, no more significant than a Turvis Tumblr or a summer squash, that it's not really a human. And I think the people who buy into that, they fancy themselves pro-science, not realizing that they've actually believed this kind of pagan religious nonsense about gestation and fetal development and human DNA and what it means to actually be a human being scientifically. Would you agree with that? Oh, yeah. I mean, the idea that the left, which supports abortion on demand, is pro-science, never fails to make me laugh because something like 99.6% of biologists agree that life begins at conception.

I don't know who the other point four are, but we just know scientifically speaking this is a human life. And you can have a complex, I suppose, ethical debate about whether or not that life must be respected or what that means in tension with the mother's bodily autonomy, for instance. But it's very clear that a human life is being ended in every abortion procedure. And that's just totally ignored. And I think for obvious reasons, because that's a very difficult thing to defend. And it's difficult to get the average person who might say, oh, I love women's rights or I'm pro choice to acknowledge and support something that is killing. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I think it actually, is so effective for pro-lifers to talk frankly. I mean, not hyperbolicly, of course, but very

frankly and factually about what abortion actually does and what it is, because unfortunately, what I found, so many people who consider themselves either personally pro-life or pro-choice or even pro-abortion, some people say that pro-abortion people don't exist. They do exist. Shout your abortion. Abortion A-F. Nehroll, all of those organizations are very pro-abortion, but they can't actually tell you what happens in an abortion. They couldn't, and if I describe what an abortion is, even reading from Planned Parenthood's website, as euphemistic as they are, I will get messages saying, you're making this up. This is a lie. That's not what happens in an abortion. And I just kind of wonder, like, what do they think happens in an abortion? Like, do you think it's fairy dust?

Like, how do you think that this goes about? Unfortunately, there's just so much ignorance surrounding this issue. And I think that's probably one of our biggest obstacles as pro-life. first, don't you think? Absolutely. And I think a huge part of it is so many people, either, you know, something like one in five women, one and three, the statistics are a little murky, but a lot of women have abortions. A lot of people know women who've had abortions or who have thought about having an abortion. And, you know, I always talk about or I try to keep in mind the importance of acknowledging those people, reaching out to them, not, you know, making them, isolating them, because it's such a personal and sort of deep issue where

you're kind of pressing on a lot of guilt or sadness or regret or who knows what. anger in people who've been involved in this procedure because it's so prevalent. And so I think that's a big part of why there's this reluctance to acknowledge or talk about what it is. And so I think as pro-lifers, we have to be really conscious about that. And yet, like you say, not shy away from what it is. And, you know, abortionists who've become pro-life former abortionist talking about what happens in an abortion, I think is one of the most powerful tools the pro-life movement has to help people see, you know, not in a judgmental way, but just factually speaking, this is what happens. and we have to oppose that.

Yeah, it can be very difficult to balance. Okay, here's the grotesque reality, just factually of what happens in an abortion, but also there's grace and love and compassion and forgiveness and acceptance for women who have gone through that. And I think, you know, there are definitely Christians and parts of the church who do that really well. I do think that as Christians and just the church in general, that we can always get better at things like that to make sure that we are not just saying,

sure women who have had abortion are accepted here in our church, but making kind of intentional space for them and reaching out to them ourselves because I think a lot of times the abortion movement itself neglects women who may be dealing with trauma and regret and guilt and maybe feelings of shame and sadness and loss. There's no place for them. And if the church is not that place, if Christians can't be that refuge for those women, then they're not going to going to find refuge. And I think that that's a that's a huge loss and that's a huge problem. Do you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. And I do think there's sort of this tension between, you know, on the left, if you embrace abortion, if you think it's a social good, if you want to

erase the stigma, as they put it, of having gotten an abortion, there isn't, like you said, room for women who might even feel the smallest bit of regret. And I think women like that probably feel silenced or like you said, there's no home for them. Because, you know, to justify abortion as this wonderful thing. You have to erase stigma rather than acknowledge that it's not always, you know, sort of a walk in the park. It's rarely, if ever, some kind of walk in the park or a wonderful, exciting choice that a woman makes with a big smile on her face. That just doesn't really happen in the real world. And I think some of the best ministries for women, you know, spreading mercy and compassion for women or people, you know, men who've been affected by abortion come from the

pro-life movement. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Okay, I want to get back into some of the politics of what's going on in abortion. We talked about Joe Biden and kind of how his stance has shifted. One person who I don't think has really changed her position on abortion, but is none, well, I guess has just become gradually more radical, it seems, is Kamala Harris. But she has been an enemy of the pro-life movement and pro-life organizations for a long time. And I'm wondering if you can give us some background of her experience. And the battles that she fought when she was Attorney General of California, some of the bills that she is pushed for while she was senator and what you're kind of expecting her influence to be in this abortion realm. Yeah, I think the fact that Biden picked her as his running mate and that she's now vice president is a sign that this administration is not going to be moderate on any kind of social issue, especially abortion.

You know, back when Harris was Attorney General of California, she helped ringlead the felony trelland. against pro-life activists who went undercover to discover that Planned Parenthood was illegally profiting from the sale of fetal body parts from aborted babies. And she, you know, aggressively went after the people who uncovered that wrongdoing. And in the Senate, she's been, I would say, one of the most radical pro-abortion senators. She sponsored legislation to overturn any state law that regulates abortion, including, you know, in the third trimester. She just is radically against any kind of abortion restriction. She voted against the Born Alive Abortion Survivor's Protection Act, which requires doctors to treat newborns who survive abortion the same way they would treat any

other newborn. So her influence on the ticket, I think, is very clearly going to be shaping an administration that backs unlimited legal abortion. She has been, her campaigns, at least, have been funded a good bit by Planned Parenthood. And so, of course, she sees Planned Parenthood as an ally and is going to continue to fight for their interests, which is taxpayer-funded, unrestricted abortion. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but also while she was Attorney General of California, she was championing the effort to try to force pro-life centers to advertise for free or affordable abortions. Is that correct? That's right. In that case, that law was actually so radical that it was struck down seven-two by the Supreme Court a couple years back. And could you explain a little bit more of what that was?

Sure. So the policy required all pro-life pregnancy centers in the state to advertise within their clinics or if they had a billboard advertisement, any place they were talking about their pro-life work. They had to also offer very visible information about the state's free or low-cost abortion program so that women who are seeking, if they wanted pro-life help or assistance in keeping their baby, they had kind of the here's where you can get your free abortion information also shoved in their faces. And so the Supreme Court struck that down on First Amendment grounds, I'm guessing. That's right. Yeah, they ruled it as a violation of the free speech of pregnancy resource centers. So we're not just seeing what Kamala Harris thinks about abortion, but we're also seeing what she thinks about our basic constitutional rights, like those that are recognized in the First Amendment, which I would say is troubling in the least. Let's talk about this other pick that has come out of California.

Xavier Bacera, he is the HHS pick. And so pro-lifers, I mean, Republicans in general, conservatives in general are concerned about this pick and how radical it is because of how radical he is and really how incompetently he has helped run California and also how he has gone after pro-life organizations in California. So can you break all of that down for us? Yeah. So Xavier Bucera, as a former congressman in Congress, he received a 100% rating from both NARAL and Planned Parenthood. He voted against a bill, for example, a pro-life effort to restrict sex-selective abortions, so abortions that were chosen based on the sex of the unborn baby. And as Attorney General, he took over right after Kamala Harris became a senator. He went ahead and was enforcing that law.

We were just talking about requiring crisis pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion. And he's been just an abortion radical in every sense of the word. He's ring-led coalitions of blue states trying to force red states not to enact pro-life policies. He's led legal challenges to the Trump administration's pro-life policies. He is kind of a died-in-the-wall abortion progressive. And with this pick, I think Biden has contradicted himself because he's tried to claim he's going to be a moderate president that he wants to have this middle of the road administration that will reach out to all Americans. And then he goes and picks as, you know, the HHS head one of the most radically pro-abortion politicians in the country. Right. And like I was

saying earlier, a lot of people say that, oh, no one is pro abortion. I think that if you could find any two examples of people who are actually pro abortion, at least in the policies that they push, and the policies that they advocate for, you've got Kamala Harris and Becerra, who are both picks by Joe Biden, who calls himself, at least he used to, personally pro-life. So I think that you're right, that that's absolutely revealing and that people have a reason, pro-life people, have a reason to be troubled by that. Okay. I want to talk also about House what you think that is going, what else you think is going to be passed if Democrats do take the Senate.

What other kind of legislation and policies in regards to abortion do you see gaining some steam and possibly being passed if Democrats control both chambers? Well, something that the left has been talking about for a while now, and you heard a lot of Democratic presidential candidates tossing this phrase around is codifying Roe v. Wade. And no one has ever really said, at least none of the presidential candidate said what they meant specifically by that. But my sense is it would be this Democratic bill that's been floating around for a while called the Women's Health Protection Act. And this would make it essentially impossible for states to pass pro-life legislation, even restrictions on abortion in the third trimester, restrictions on, you know, elective abortions of healthy unborn babies.

It would, I guess, enable the federal government to direct those down. I'm not convinced that it's a constitutional proposal, but this is something. something Kamala Harris has backed. This is something that growing numbers of Democrats support. I'm not sure. I mean, I don't think it's something that even a Democratic Senate could push through, given how narrow the margin will be. But this is kind of where the sort of hardcore on the left is headed when it comes to abortion. Why do you think abortion is an issue that the Democratic Party has become so militant on? You know, that's the million dollar question right there. And I do think a big part of it does go back to the money that the party gets from these massive pro-abortion

groups. Planned Parenthood and NAROL have an immense amount of political money that they pour into these campaigns. And you can see the power that it has, at least in some smaller races, for instance, this spring, longtime pro-life Democrat Dan Lipinski lost his primary to a pro-abortion challenger, Marie Newman, who is backed primarily by abortion rights groups. So they can go right after someone. They can use their money to unseat a Democrat who they think is insufficiently supportive of abortion. And that's not to say they control the party. But, you know, But the optics of being labeled anti-choice or anti-woman by Planned Parenthood, I think, are very frightening to most Democrats. And Democratic supporters have, whether or not they fancy themselves pro-choice or pro-abortion, they have kind of convinced themselves that this is a really small issue, that this is not something that a Joe Biden administration would really fight for.

And there's even some people who describe themselves as, you know, Christian Democrats or holistically pro-life Christian Democrats who say that, okay, but they're passing other policies that are reducing abortion. So it's actually pro-life to allow women to have this choice, but also, you know, provide other services or programs that are going to help women and then consequently reduce abortion. Do you buy that line of reasoning? I think this is something pro-lifers here all the time. You know, you're not actually pro-life unless you support a vast welfare state or unless you're pro-illegal immigration or whatever it might be. But the charge never goes in the other direction, right? It's never, oh, you can't be pro-life if you support loosening immigration laws and support a welfare state, but you must also oppose abortion, right? They never say that. It's always, well, we'll just forget about unlimited legal abortion as long as you're supporting these other progressive policy items. And I don't buy that argument at all because, the best way to reduce support rights is to make it illegal. And of course, the pro-life movement is about a lot more than overturning row, about a lot more than passing laws to make abortion illegal. We want to make it illegal and unthinkable. But you can't just say, oh, well, this is going to be a pro-life administration despite having the most radical pro-abortion politician on a presidential ticket ever in Kamala Harris.

Yeah. And it's not just about like, you know, sometimes we hear, well, abortion regulation isn't going to decrease the number of abortions, which is something I, of course, disagree with. And I'll get into that in just a second. But it's also not just about decreasing the number. It's also recognizing the inherent dignity and therefore the rights of a child inside the womb legally. And so like you were saying, it's funny to me that people who don't believe that a child inside the womb has human rights, that they don't even have the very basic legal right to life, that they shouldn't be defended legally at all. That person feels they have the moral authority to tell me that I am not pro-life

because I don't believe in single-payer health care or something like that. I just wonder why we can't say, okay, let's start there. Like let's start at the very basic belief that a baby inside the womb deserves the most fundamental legal right that there is, the right to not be killed as an innocent person. But unfortunately, like you said, they kind of ignore that as if that's not a fundamental part of being pro-life. And actually, that's not a part of being pro-life at all. And you can kind of ignore that all together as long as you accept all of their other policy proposals, then you're really pro-life. I just think it's so important for pro-lifers, people who are anti-abortion to pull the conversation back in the other direction.

And do not let this be the conversation that is dominated by leftism. do not let them redefine the terms according to their ideology. Do you agree with that? Yeah, you know, I think it goes back to what we were talking about a little bit ago about how the other side, you know, supporters of legal abortion don't want to talk about what abortion is. And so when you hear these charges like, oh, you can't be pro-life if you don't support X, Y, or Z sort of progressive agenda item, they're just trying to distract from whatever you might have just said about what abortion is, right? If I say abortion is the taking of a human life and the response is, well, you don't support the welfare state. So who cares? It's obviously a distraction

tactic because they don't want to respond to why they support something that is killing. And I think we have to return the conversation like you're saying to that fundamental point because it's very difficult to defend. And that's, you know, hopefully where you win people over. Right, right. I do think it's so important, as you're saying so well, to get down to the nitty gritty, to the fundamental disagreement. Because usually when you get down there, if you can get someone who is pro-choice to say, why do you think it should be legal to take this human life, but not another human life? What is the reason for that? Sometimes what you'll realize and what they'll reveal is that they don't actually believe

that that's a human life. And so you realize that they're actually operating from a philosophical point of view about human significance and what actually not makes a human, but what makes a person without even realizing that they have done so. And then once you can get down to that, the, the, the, the, the foundations that people are building these pro-choice or pro-life beliefs on, I think that you can actually have a substantive conversation. But I think, you know, with the pro-abortion side, the PR arm of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, do such a good job of covering up that part of the conversation with all of

these euphemisms that it's very hard to dig down past the nonsense about reproductive justice and choice and women's autonomy, all this stuff that doesn't make any sense, and get down to what you actually believe because that's like a significant worldview, almost theological question that I think most people just don't want to deal with. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity,

and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts.

I hope you'll join us. Yeah, and I think it's really important to get to that conversation, not only because it's important to remind people what abortion is or force them to maybe reflect a little bit more on what exactly happens in an abortion procedure. But because when you think about the logic that justifies abortion, like you say, if we acknowledge that this is a human being, which scientifically speaking it is, and if we acknowledge that this procedure ends that human life, suddenly we have to find some kind of other fancy philosophical way of justifying that killing. And usually it is something like, well, that's not a person because. But unfortunately, for defenders of abortion,

this sort of depersonifying philosophy is it's behind every oppressive regime, every oppressive policy in human history. Once we determine, you know, we say these people with power can decide that these other human beings are not persons and therefore can be oppressed or killed or enslaved. That's a horrible position to be in. And I think most people don't reflect on the fact that they can't dehumanize or depersonify the unborn without necessarily not only endorsing that horrible logic, but also, you know, probably dehumanizing the disabled or the poor or the elderly or the sick or the dying.

No one wants to be doing that. And ironically, and this is a phrase that I hear a lot from the social justice left, is taking on the language of the oppressor, while the depersoning, the depersonifying of any kind of human being, whether it's like you said, a poor person or a person of a certain race or ethnicity or religion or an unborn child is the language of the oppressor for a side that especially right now says that they are so concerned with power dynamics. They're so concerned with hegemony. They're so concerned with the oppressed versus the oppressor.

How did they not see that the most oppressed class right now are the children, the helpless children, the vulnerable children, that we are dismembering inside the womb? It's really hard for me to understand how they. have tried to make that worldview congruent. Yeah, I think, unfortunately, the problem is the sort of modern abortion rights movement or pro-abortion movement is so deeply ingrained or imbued with the radical feminist logic that they've sort of embraced wholesale, the idea that women are oppressed and not only that, but that freedom from pregnancy or motherhood or childbearing is a key to female autonomy. And so if you're going to support women who are often oppressed by men in their

worldview, then you have to embrace whatever they need to free them from unwanted motherhood, which is a very dark view of what it means to be a woman, I think, and what it means to be free. But I think they've sort of talked themselves out of seeing the unborn as humans because they see unborn children and children often as kind of a competitor to women's happiness and well-being. Yeah, that was very clarifying. It's almost that an unwanted unborn child is actually the oppressor in that scenario, which when you think about it is obviously very illogical, but from the point of view that you just explained, it makes sense in scare quotes, if you will. I want to talk about a couple articles that you

wrote recently, just so people kind of have a finger on a pulse of what's going on nationally. You wrote an article a couple weeks ago about a bill that was passed in Ohio, and I don't know the state of it now, that is setting to require respectful disposal of fetal remains after abortion. Can you talk about what this bill is, the state of it, and why the heck anyone would be opposing something like this? Of course. So this bill in Ohio requires abortion providers to give women the option of burial or cremation for the fetal remains after an abortion procedure. And if the woman opt out of making a decision, then the abortion provider is responsible for selecting one option and carrying it out. So the idea is we're acknowledging that although we're going to permit legal abortion, we have to permit legal abortion. Women can choose this.

We still want to be as respectful as possible to the remains of that child who is killed an abortion. And so we'll require abortion providers to treat their remains like they would any other human being. We don't just toss, you know, deceased people out with a medical waste. Why should we do this for unborn children? And this law has actually met quite a bit of, I guess, furor from the other side, the ACL is very opposed to this legislation. Abortion rights groups are very opposed to this type of legislation. And that actually, I think, is very related to what we were just talking about when it comes to dehumanizing because a bill like this obviously is the bare minimum of doing

something pro-life. You're not stopping abortion. You're not regulating abortion at all. But you are kind of emphasizing the fact that something is lost here. There's a human being who's been disposed of and we ought to treat those remains respectfully because this is a human being. And I think that's so telling that the other side is opposed to that because they hate any acknowledgement that this is a human being. And I expect the bill will be challenged in court. A similar bill in Indiana was challenged and in fact was upheld by the Supreme Court. So I think that this will probably fare well at the judicial level. So you and I know, as you just explained, what the underneath is of their opposition, but what are they staying their argument is? What is the ACLU? What are these

pro-abortion groups saying for the reason they oppose this? They are claiming that it is a restriction on women's rights, which I can't explain to you how that logic makes sense as it pertains to the law, because obviously it's not restricting women's choice at all. Right. And it's so convoluted because I saw an organization, I forget what it's called, but you know who Leroy Carhart is. He specializes in late term and third trimester abortion.

They are another pro-abortion group, and I just had the misfortune of looking through their Twitter timeline, and they were doing these post-abortion boxes where you actually put the baby's footprint. I mean, I just want to cry thinking about it. Footprint on, you know, ink and on a piece of paper so people can remember the child that they chose to abort. And so it's very strange that in those situations, they're okay with acknowledging that, yeah, this was a human being. This was a child that was lost.

But in the situation where the child's, I don't know, another kind of abortion situation, they don't want to acknowledge the humanity. So again, I think it just goes back to what you were saying. We see the inconsistency of this view that personhood, according to this view, is assigned to people according to who has the power to do the assigning. There is no inherent value to human beings. It's only what society says is valuable. And that puts us in a really, really dangerous spot, don't you think? It doesn't. And I think you can see that same illogic on the other side when it comes to late-term abortion,

like you were referencing a lot of the times we hear abortion rights supporters or Democratic politicians justifying their opposition to pro-life abortion regulations later in pregnancy by saying, oh, you know, so much of the time these are wanted pregnancies and there's some, you know, horrible health situation that comes up and, you know, the parents have to make this choice that no parents want to make. Well, that obviously is in tension with the idea that, you know, abortion is some great social good, that women are excited to choose or we shouldn't, there shouldn't be stigma surrounding this. And it's also intention with the idea that there's nothing inside a woman or it's a clump of cells or it can just be gotten rid of with no consequences.

If it's a wanted child some of the time, even in some of the cases where a woman wants to choose abortion, how could it just at other times be nothing that we should just throw out with the medical trash. Yeah, you're so right. And it's, it's a, it's an inconsistency that goes far beyond just, you know, the existence of cognitive dissonance. I mean, this is moral dissonance with real tangible life and death consequences that we're talking about here. Massachusetts Democrats, you wrote about recently, they pushed unlimited abortion in their annual budget. You wrote about that back in November. I don't know where it stands now. But can you talk a little bit more about that?

Sure. So in Massachusetts, Democrats have been pushing a bill called the Roe Act for quite some time. This is a bill that would essentially loosen regulations on abortion. There are very few regulations already in Massachusetts on abortion. But it would make it easier to obtain an abortion after 24 weeks, which is well after fetal viability. And it would actually also erase the parental consent requirement. So as of right now, if a young girl, a minor is. is seeking an abortion, she has to at least inform her parents. And if they don't consent,

she can use the judicial bypass process to get permission from a judge to go through with an abortion for whatever reason. And now the Democrats are attempting to push this legislation through the fiscal year 2021 budget. So because they couldn't get enough support, I gather, to pass this as standalone legislation, they're trying to incorporate this into a budget. And the state's governor is a Republican. He tends to be supportive of abortion, but he has signed that he would prefer not to sign this in a budget, doesn't want to see non-budgetary provisions in the budget. So I think there's a good chance he likely won't be signing it. But that's sort of where the party's headed in Massachusetts. Yeah. I just think it's so important for people to realize,

you know, we saw a lot of people going into the presidential election making the argument that the Democratic Party actually is the pro-life party, that being pro-life party, that being pro-cho doesn't necessarily preclude you from being pro-life, that no one is pro-abortion, that they're not pushing very hard for this. And look, I'm not saying that you have to, I'm not saying that you have to have voted for Donald Trump. I'm not saying that you have to like all Republican politicians. All I'm saying is that what we're seeing, based on the real legislation and the real policies, that a lot of people, not every Democrat, but the majority of the Democratic Party is pushing, they are pro-abortion pieces of legislation.

They are radical pieces of legislation in the way of abortion. This lie that we've been told, the Democratic politicians and their policies actually reduce the number of abortions. It's just not true. There is this CDC chart. I'm sure you saw it, Alexandria, that was going around before the election that showed that under Democratic presidents that abortions went down by a larger percent than they did under Republican presidents, trying to make.

the claim that somehow Obama reduced the number of abortions, not realizing that actually under Obama, the state legislatures, which make the majority of these kinds of abortion-related decisions, were dominated by Republicans, that presidents have very little to do with the number of abortions because they have very little to do with this policy, or with this kind of policy. Have you seen that kind of fallacy? The Democrats are really the pro-life party for allowing more abortion. Have you seen that grow in popularity in particular among Christians? Yeah, there's this sort of strange idea that somehow, you know, whether or not you're regulating abortion or making it, you know, unavailable later in pregnancy doesn't actually have anything

to do with how often women get abortions, which is just clearly not the case, right? Like, that's not the only way that one would go about trying to decrease the number of abortions and decreasing abortion is not the only goal of the pro-life movement. But to say that there's no connection between abortion regulations and the abortion rate is obviously pretty ridiculous. And I do think it goes hand-to-hand with what we were talking about in terms of, you know, the abortion right side trying to delegitimize pro-life arguments. And I think this is what you see a lot of the times in Christian circles. I know I've seen it among Catholics and particularly left-wing Catholics who are either supportive of abortion or don't think it's an important issue for Catholics to worry about

saying things like, oh, you know, you must vote for Democrats because they support an And then, you know, they list the policy platform positions that they think all Catholics ought to support. And then they just either sideline or ignore or minimize the importance of the fact that the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly radical, both at the federal and at most state levels when it comes to abortion later and later in pregnancy. And to claim that it's not pro-abortion to allow abortion after a baby can survive outside the womb is insane, right? Because at that point, the baby could just be born and given up for adoption or taking care of. Of course, it's a complicated situation. But to say that a woman should be able to kill that child when it could survive birth is obviously supportive of abortion as killing and not merely as not being pregnant anymore. Yeah, you're so right.

Can you leave people with any sense of kind of encouragement or maybe equipment's advice on what to do? They're like, oh, I want to oppose some of this legislation. I want to oppose some of these policies. I want to get the word out. I don't know what to do. Can you give them some wisdom? and some advice for how they can kind of push back against this radicalism towards abortion? Well, I think when it comes to policies and legislation in particular, given how divided the Senate will be,

you know, we don't know how the Georgia runoffs will go, but we'll have a closely divided Senate either way. And so I think it'll become really important to actually contact your senators and emphasize that you don't want them to support radical pro-abortion legislation, or you do want them to back pro-life legislation if it comes up in the Senate probably won't really go anywhere for now, with Biden in the White House. But that's an important stop gap and it will be for the next four years. And I also think just kind of at the sort of lower level, the non-political level, given how much misinformation there is out there, how many people are really ignorant about this issue and how hard it can be to find accurate information, go looking for the truth, educate yourself about what abortion is, find resources that you can trust and be willing

to share those with people who you might disagree with and who aren't sure what they think. I think that's really the best way to move the pro-life movement forward is at that kind of aggressor's level. And I would just encourage people, if you're ever hearing about a bill that has to do with abortion, especially on the federal level, but also on the state level, and you don't know what's true, you don't know what to make of it. I just really encourage people to follow Alexandra and to see if she's already written about it at National Review. She really cuts through the noise and she helps you understand what's really going on, what's really in the bill. And so I encourage people to follow you and to make sure that they are reading your articles. Can you give people more

information about where they can follow you and find you? Thank you so much. I appreciate that. So my work is almost all at national review.com. You can follow me on Twitter at Zan underscore desanctus. And I also occasionally published elsewhere, but you should be able to find that on my Twitter. Awesome. Well, thank you. And as this is coming out, so this is coming out on Monday, January 4th, that means tomorrow, as people are listening, is January 5th. And that is the day for the Georgia election. So listen to all of this and realize that there is a lot on the line when it comes to this election in Georgia.

There's a lot on the line when it comes to Democrats potentially taking over the Senate. There's a lot that's going to be passed, especially in the way of abortion. So make sure I know that there's a lot of hesitance when it comes to Georgia and the integrity of the election. but make sure that you go out and vote at least do your part, everything that you can, especially when it comes to protecting this particular issue. Thank you so much, Alexandra. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on.

Thanks so much for having me. Hey, this is Steve Daste. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. on the Steve Day show we take the news of the day and tested against first principles faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

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