Rep. Ilhan Omar’s attempt to scare people into supporting abortion using outright lies isn’t working out.
The Minnesota Democrat asserted Wednesday that recently passed bills banning most abortions in states like Georgia and Alabama would “criminalize women” who undergo the procedure — but according to even liberal fact-checkers, that claim just isn’t true.
Getting the facts straight
The freshman congresswoman’s less-than-forthright remarks came in a talk delivered by Omar on the House floor last week.
“I rise today to defy the horrifying attacks happening against women’s reproductive rights all across this country,” she said of recent state-level anti-abortion legislation. “Religious fundamentalists are currently trying to manipulate state laws in order to impose their beliefs on an entire society, all with complete disregard for voices and the rights of American women.”
She went on: “The recent efforts like those in Alabama, in Georgia are only the latest in a long history of efforts to criminalize women for simply existing, to punish us when we don’t conform to their attempts to control us.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) attacks conservative people of faith on the House floor, suggests that their concern for unborn babies is not genuine and they are hypocrites pic.twitter.com/XGiWwB51GV
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) May 23, 2019
That’s not how this works
But criminalizing women isn’t what these laws are really all about, according to fact-checkers like Snopes.
The Alabama law to which Omar is referring, H.B. 314, explicitly states that doctors, not patients, would be held liable for performing the procedures.
H.B. 314 reads in part: “This bill would provide that a woman who receives an abortion will not be held criminally culpable or civilly liable for receiving the abortion.”
Moreover, although the Georgia bill, H.B. 481, lacks such language, it also fails to suggest that pregnant women would face criminal penalties over the procedure. In fact, abortion laws have historically indemnified patients in favor of punishing the physician.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped liberals like Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern from continuing to make the argument that these bills aren’t pro-life, but rather, anti-woman.
But just because you keep repeating a lie doesn’t make it true.
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