GOP Tries to Convince Women That Having Their Rights Taken Away is a Good Thing

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Carly Fiorina is one of the Republican Party’s few female standard bearers and so she keeps getting booked on TV to sell Republicanism. On ABC’s This Week today, she pretended that the Republican Party is really not-so-extreme on women’s issues and thus, you single ladies should vote Republican.

Naturally this involved much moving of the goal posts in trying to pass off Rick Perry’s (R-TX) anti-women legislation as not extreme — thereby totally missing the point and ignoring the real issue, or as Republicans say, “Winning.”

Fiorina ended up actually arguing that there are only five countries in the world that give women freedom and authority over their bodies so why should we consider Republicans extreme for not wanting to be one of them?

Watch here via ABC:

(Quotes from ABC News’s transcript.)

Stephanopoulos asked, “Mitt Romney won married women, but lost single women by almost 50 — 46 points. How do you turn that around?”

Fironia tried to take Rick Perry’s anti-women turd and turn it into gold by distorting the issue, “We have to turn it around by having reasonable discussions around the things labeled extreme. A very simple example. First of all, not everyone in the Republican party is pro-life, I am, but there are many pro-choice republicans. When Governor Perry pushed forward legislation in Texas to ban abortion after 20 weeks, it was labeled as an extreme move.”

Oh, she was hardly done with pretending not to understand the real issue. She continued that there are only five countries in the world that give women freedom so why should we?

“That’s five months. Five months. There are only four countries in the world that have — that legalize abortion after five months, China, North Korea, Canada and the US. It’s actually not a particularly extreme position to say a woman needs to have a choice up to five months. Then there has to be a medical reason. But it got cast as a very extreme point. I would be willing to wager that there are many, many single women who are pro-choice, who say you know what, five months sounds reasonable to me. I think part of the Republican party’s challenge is to not fall into the trap of having issues cast the way our political opponents want them cast, and be willing and courageous enough to have the debate.”

This refrain that Republicans need to stop letting their “opponents” (also known as the voters on this particular issue) frame the debate is a big sign that they are losing the argument, because it isn’t that the voters are reframing the issue- it is that the Republicans are not in step with mainstream America. They are not listening to the voters.

Republicans are not going to get single women to vote for them by trying to rebrand their policies of limiting women’s freedom and assuming ownership over women’s bodies. The fact that they think they can do this only shows that they don’t know the first thing about this voting bloc.

But even Texas voters didn’t agree with what Rick Perry did because even in Texas, they do not want lawmakers and governors making private medical decisions for them. They do not think family values/porn investor Rick Perry is qualified to make medical decisions for them. Go figure.

Indeed, 74% of Texas voters said “personal, private medical decisions about whether to have an abortion should be made by a woman, her family, and her doctor.” By a large majority, Texans, including Republicans, would prefer to see their politicians working on jobs and the economy rather than trying to limit abortion.

The reason Republicans keep trying to reframe the issue around late term abortion is because it’s a much easier sale to the general public. It sounds reasonable to discuss the morality of abortion after 5 months.

It does not sound reasonable to claim you are anti-abortion and then shut down the clinics that provide birth control and family planning – the very methods that reduce the incidence of abortion– but that is exactly what Rick Perry and Texas Republicans did.

Thus, the bill was not about abortion after 5 months, as Fiorina tried to present it, but rather about who should be making health care decisions for private citizens.

To make matters even more apparent, The Dallas News reported at the time that the Republican bill violates the best medical standards. “The Texas chapter president of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and other doctors testified that those protocols are no longer considered the best practice by most obstetricians. Both the dosage and method of delivery have changed.”

It does not sound reasonable for Perry and Texas Republicans to claim that they know what is best for you and your family, that they know better than your doctor, that they should be in charge of your medical decisions or your religious beliefs – because no sane person would want to grant the government that authority and power.

If Republicans continue trying to have dishonest conversations about the issues they stand for, they should expect to continue losing the debate. Standing on the wrong side of a Constitutionally protected freedom and then lying about it is not a great way to win over voters in the age of the Internet.

Sarah Jones

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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