Today, the UK’s “centrist” newspaper The Independent reported that Brandon Wade, founder of a popular website for sugar daddies (older men that spend lavishly on their younger girlfriends for sex), has offered to pay Alabama women to have out-of-state abortions. The Independent's article itself is packed with rhetoric and misinformation meant to defame the pro-life support for the Alabama abortion bill.
According to a CNN article he wrote in 2014, Wade believes that “Love is a concept invented by poor people.” Acting on that, he spends his days helping lonely men peddle money to young women through his website “Seeking Arrangement,” a site that connects “Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies or Mommas” to form “Mutually Beneficial Relationships™.” The website claims to have over 10 million active members.
In a video released by the website yesterday, the founder announced:
We will provide women and families who cannot afford to provide for themselves, travel out of their home state to access proper health care and to exercise their right to a choice.
The virtuous Wade will fund abortion-seeking women through a charity called Fight Against Poverty that he and his Alabama-native girlfriend Zoe Glaze plan to launch. The charity’s first donor will be Wade himself, who is planning to give an initial contribution between $500,000 and $1 million.
The Independent was slow to report on Wade's video, posting its piece 24 hours after the story had originally broke. In the scramble to catch up, The Independent regurgitated pro-abortion activist language and outright untruths.
According to the article, Wade’s philanthropy is a direct response to the “anti-abortion campaigners” that “waged war on abortion rights.” Depicting pro-life groups as militant and presupposing abortion as a right, the article asserted:
Opponents of abortion across America have become increasingly emboldened in their efforts to roll back women’s reproductive rights since Donald Trump entered the White House in January 2017.
This assertion was built off a premise given earlier in the article that Alabama’s abortion ban “has been branded a ‘death sentence for women’” -- a claim that the article provided no source for.
Most egregiously of all, The Independent reported:
The [Alabama] bill imposes jail sentences for women found guilty of aborting or attempting to abort their pregnancies, with the potential for life imprisonment and the death penalty.
This is a lie, directly contradicting what the bill actually says. The bill’s synopsis explicitly states:
This bill would provide that a woman who receives an abortion will not be held criminally culpable or civilly liable for receiving the abortion.
However, the bill does classify a completed abortion as a Class A felony punishable by a minimum of 10 years in prison, but it would only prosecute the doctor who performed the abortion. Also, U.S. federal law only permits the death penalty in the case of murder, though it is unclear whether the Alabama bill classifies abortion as murder. Regardless, the bill's classification differs from Alabama’s statute on murder, which explicitly states that murder is punishable by death.
These facts were clearly ignored by the editors at The Independent. But it’s all part of the ongoing smear campaign against the pro-life movement.
