MSNBC contributor Irin Carmon continued her obsession with abortion on Thursday, penning an article for MSNBC.com titled “Why the GOP Is Still Talking About Abortion.” Carmon mocked Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and RNC chairman Reince Priebus for holding up the protection of innocent life as a core principle of the Republican Party.
Yes, the party which got its start advocating the sanctity of human lives degraded and exploited on the plantation is being scolded for advocating the sanctity of human life in the womb. Wrote Carmon:
All of the sensitivity trainings in the world can’t change that core principle, apparently, in part because opposition to abortion, and even contraception, remains a motivating issue for the Republican base.
It’s not opposition to abortion that motivates social conservatives, Irin. It’s the belief that innocent life is worth protecting. That’s why social conservatives prefer to be called “pro-life.” Are you motivated by opposition to live births?
Carmon employed some rhetorical tricks in her piece, such as this nugget:
During the hearing today, Franks sought assurance from witness and George Mason law professor Helen Alvare – who has been called "birth control’s worst enemy" – that women actually don’t want insurance coverage for abortion. (Nearly one in three American women will have an abortion in her lifetime.)
There’s a difference between having an abortion and wanting insurance coverage for it. By placing the one sentence in parentheses after the other, Carmon tried to suggest that the latter sentence refuted the former.
Carmon also asserted that private health insurance plans, when left to their own devices, “usually cover abortion.” That is not entirely clear. (PolitiFact shed some light on this question last March.) Back in 2004, a Guttmacher Institute study claimed that 87 percent of employer-based insurance policies at the time covered “medically necessary or appropriate abortions.” However, a similar study by the Kaiser Family Foundation a year earlier found that 46 percent of workers with employer-based plans had coverage for “elective abortions” that did not involve a medical emergency. So it all depends on what type of abortion you want to talk about.
One has to wonder how Carmon can talk and write about abortion all day. The New York Abortion Access Fund's 2013 "Champion of for Choice" award winner complains that the GOP is still talking about abortion, yet she -- a visiting fellow at Yale Law School's Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice -- is the biggest abortion fanatic at MSNBC, a network that spends a lot of time talking about abortion and the so-called “war on women.”
For Republicans, it’s about life; for Carmon, it’s always about abortion.
