As Frederick Kaufman noted in UnHerd recently, Hollywood liberals rule America – and they are leveraging the combined force of their cultural power to get Kamala Harris elected. It is easy to scoff at the population of America’s entertainment industry as empty-headed and shallow – but it is their movies, their shows, and their songs that everyone is addicted to. That’s why when the Democrats needed to take out Joe Biden, they called George Clooney.
As I noted recently, Hollywood has been reliably pro-abortion but has generally kept abortion activism off-screen. It is difficult to present abortion as a good and empowering thing, because most normal people – even those who see abortion as necessary – see it as a necessary evil. But with the abortion wars ramping up, the propaganda machine has been thrown into high gear with films such as Unpregnant, Call Jane, and Never Rarely, Sometimes Always.
The truth, of course, is that the Democrat position on abortion is extreme and out of step with public opinion. Kamala Harris voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would have mandated medical care for babies surviving an abortion. Her running mate, Tim Walz, supports the right to infanticide. Even some mainstream newspapers have noted this fact – a recent headline in the Des Moines Registerreminded readers: “Kamala Harris, Tim Walz support allowing newborns to die. Americans can’t support that.”
Neither Harris nor Walz will retract their radical positions; the Democratic Party has sold its soul to the abortion industry. A mobile Planned Parenthood parked near the Democratic National Convention facilitated the destruction of at least 25 babies in the womb. Child sacrifice is a progressive rite as well as a right. And so in order to alleviate concerns, the Democrats are again calling on their Hollywood friends. Seinfeld co-creator and comedy actor Larry David stepped up to the plate, penning a Washington Post column titled “My post-birth abortion: A Trumpian fantasy brought to life.”
David begins by quoting Trump’s condemnation of late-term abortion: “It must be remembered that the Democrats are the radical ones on this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth. And that’s exactly what it is. The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth is unacceptable. And almost everyone agrees with that.” Because this statement is true, it cannot be debunked – and so thus it must be mocked. David writes:
He’s right: We do support executions after birth. In fact, many Dems support executions of kids up until age 4 or until they start kindergarten. I respect their opinions, but that’s a little late for my taste. I’m good until 2½.
I’ve never said this publicly, but my wife, Thelma, and I had a post-birth abortion, and it was just minutes after the baby was born. I was in my 30s when I met the girl of my dreams. We shared much in common, especially our belief in post-birth abortions. In fact, that was one of my questions on our first date, because it would have been a big red flag for me if she didn’t. Thankfully, she was even more adamant about them than I was. It was a match made in heaven.
Get it? The premise is obviously absurd, and only an idiot would believe it (although the two idiots at the top of Democratic ticket did vote for it). David writes that after having a healthy baby, he and Thelma decided that the child wasn’t worth keeping:
‘No way I’m taking him home. He’s embarrassing. Am I supposed to show that monster to my parents and my friends? I can’t even look at him without cringing.’
I had to admit she had a point. I turned to the doctor. He was wearing a Jimmy Carter campaign pin, so I had no qualms about asking his opinion.
The doctor pursed his lips. ‘I completely agree with her. I even had to look away for a moment when I pulled him out. He’s not going to have an easy life with a punim like that. So if you want to do it, now’s the best time.’
Fortunately, we lived in California. A lot of people around the country had to drive out of state for their post-birth abortions. What a drag that must’ve been – before podcasts!
I turned to Thelma. ‘You down?’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’
The doctor nodded and took the grotesquerie into another room. Thelma, who had been in a foul mood since the kid came out, perked up. ‘Hey, maybe we can go to Skip’s party now!’
The column isn’t funny, but the point isn’t comedy per se – it is to ridicule the claim that the Democrats support the idea of post-birth abortion by asserting that nobody could ever support such a thing. The very concept, David is saying, is nonsensical. I only wish he were right. I suspect he knows that he is not, but perhaps he really is ignorant of the policy positions of the politicians he supports. The reality is that official data records babies being born alive after abortions and left to die with horrifying regularity, and every Democrat voted against protecting these children.
Larry David’s attempt at fiction fails as art but may work as propaganda. As a factual corrective, let me quote some nonfiction – the testimony of Jill Stanek, whose testimony as a nurse in Illinois led to the federal ban on partial birth abortion:
To commit induced labor abortion, a doctor or resident inserts a medication into the mother’s birth canal close to the cervix. The cervix is the opening at the bottom of the uterus that normally stays closed until a mother is about 40 weeks pregnant and ready to deliver. This medication irritates the cervix and stimulates it to open early. When this occurs, the small second or third trimester pre-term, fully formed baby falls out of the uterus, sometimes alive. By law, if an aborted baby is born alive, both birth and death certificates must be issued. Ironically, at Christ Hospital the cause of death often listed for live aborted babies is ‘extreme prematurity,’ an acknowledgement by doctors that they have caused this death.
These babies can often live on for hours, Stanek revealed. Some of them, aborted healthy, live longer than others. Even in these circumstances, where it is so clear that a human being has been murdered, hospital staff attempts to normalize the experience:
In the event that an aborted baby is born alive, she or he receives ‘comfort care,’ defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until s/he dies. Parents may hold the baby if they wish. If the parents do not want to hold their dying aborted baby, a staff member cares for the baby until s/he dies. If staff did not have the time or desire to hold the baby, s/he is taken [to] Christ Hospital’s new Comfort Room, which is complete with a First Foto Machine if parents want professional pictures of their aborted baby, baptismal supplies, gowns, and certificates, foot printing equipment and baby bracelets for mementos, and a rocking chair. Before the Comfort Room was established, babies were taken to the Soiled Utility Room to die.
One experience stands out starkly in Stanek’s mind:
One night, a nursing co-worker was taking a Down’s syndrome baby who was aborted alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was between 21 and 22 weeks old, weighed about 1/2 pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I could not tell if he was still alive. I held him up to the light to see through his chest wall whether his heart was still beating. After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where all of our dead patients are taken.
These appalling stories give us a brief glimpse of the children we throw away. At Live Action, pro-life blogger Sarah Terzo recounted the testimony of a Philadelphia nurse named Linda, who frequently collected aborted babies after saline abortions were performed and they were delivered dead. In one bed, she found a tiny child, 1.5 pounds, in a woman’s hospital bed. “It looked right at me,” she recalled. “This baby had real big eyes. It looked at you like it was saying, ‘Do something – do something.’ Those haunting eyes. Oh God, I still remember them.”
The Democrats support this horror show, but they cannot admit that publicly. And so, in response, they first lie and claim that laws protecting these babies are unnecessary – and then they call on their Hollywood buddies to ridicule the very idea.
