Keating wrote: ↑
Kirbmarc wrote: ↑Today it's Northam and his blackface/hood photo, so screw him, tomorrow it might be someone who wrote than transwomen aren't real women.
Meh, I think his proposal that killing babies after birth counts as abortion was the bigger problem.
This is misleading, though.
The proposal is about lowering the number of doctors required to certify the need for a third trimester abortion from three to one, and extending the qualifications for third trimester abortions from risk of death or "substantial and irremediable" impairment to mental or physical health to simply threat to mental or physical health.
The "killing babies" bit wasn't in the proposal, it was in an interview about a comment that another political figure, Kathy Tran, made, where she answered to questions in a committee and said that in SOME cases abortion might be justified UP UNTIL the point of birth.
Northam was asked about Tran's comment in a radio interview, and was asked what would happen if, after a botched abortion at a very late stage in pregnancy, the child was born. Northam should have said that this was a medical decision, not part of the bill, but he mouthed off a comment about how "the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
This is controversial statement for sure, but a) it's NOT about "killing babies after birth" and b) it's NOT part of the bill. Crucially the bill doesn't say that the infant is to resuscitated only if that's what the mother and the family desired. By not making this explicit, it puts the decision of resuscitation on the doctor.
Northam (who we can now tell has some issues with "edgy" ideas) made a comment in an interview about a specific issue that might ensue with a late-term abortion which INDUCES a birth, in which case the child is stillborn and can be resuscitated, not about generically killing babies after the birth.
It was a stupid comment because that's NOT part of the bill, it's a medical issue about the specifics of an edge case that MIGHT present itself as a consequence of a BOTCHED abortion, but also in general if an abnormal pregnancy produced the birth of a stillborn child, even without a botched abortion.
So you have a controversial bill, a controversial comment and a controversial interview all meshed together and turned into a narrative of "infanticide".
The GOP, however, rapidly seized the opportunity to run a scaremongering campaign about "killing babies after birth", as if the bill was about that.
Northam was an idiot to answer a question about a complex medical issue as part of a grilling interview. We can safely say, between this and the blackface shenanigans, that he's not big on emotional intelligence.
But the GOP has also manipulated things for electoral gain, to push a scaremongering narrative of abortion being extended to mothers ordering doctors to kill children after birth.