Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:23 pm
Donald Trump doesn’t respect women at all. He doesn’t even respect their right to live.
During Wednesday night’s final presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Republican Donald Trump about the many accusations of sexual assault various vetted women have come forward with. In response, Trump said nobody respects women more than he does. Fact check: False. Big league.
And I’m not alone. The debate audience literally laughed when Donald Trump said, “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.â€
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Watch here via the Cut:
Look at Hillary Clinton’s face as she listens to Donald Trump’s dismissive, contemptuous response:
It’s funny and then it’s horrifying and sad.
It’s not just Donald Trump’s contempt for women or his crude and rude language. Sure, it was off-putting when Trump said, “Such a nasty woman” of his Democratic opponent as Clinton answered a question about funding Social Security.
And it further branded Trump as a misogynist, which is the last thing he needed with him losing the women Romney had in 2012. Things got so bad for Trump on the nasty woman front that a website named “nastywomengets***done.com” was immediately created and redirects to Hillary Clinton’s policies. #nastywomenvote was trending last night.
But there is also the horrifying way Trump discussed women’s right to make their own healthcare decisions last night and his cluelessly proud announcement that appointing conservative justices would “automatically” overturn Roe V Wade.
Donald Trump moved the goal post to suggest that Hillary Clinton’s position is to support fictional last hour late term abortions, “Now, you can say that that’s OK, and Hillary can say that that’s OK, but it’s not OK with me. Because based on what she is saying, and based on where she’s going and where she’s been, you can take a baby and rip the baby out of the womb. In the ninth month, on the final day and that’s not acceptable.”
Yeah. That sounds really bad. Except no one is doing that. According to Everyday Feminism stats, “…abortions performed after 20 weeks only make up about 1% of total abortions.” Who has them? As Hillary Clinton was trying to point out last night, many late term abortions are had by women who wanted their pregnancy, but either her health is at risk or they find out at 20 weeks, which is the time most people find out, that there are tragic birth defects.
There are already 43 states that “prohibit some abortions after a certain point in pregnancy”.
But even if Trump was right and women were doing this at the very last minute, this is no reason to make abortion before viability illegal, as Trump is suggesting his justices would (he is also wrong about assuming that would happen automatically, but no one is going to accuse Trump of understanding how government works).
This means that Donald Trump would seek to make abortion illegal in all cases, otherwise why is he objecting to a law that already allows states to set restrictions based on the health of the mother.
Since 59% of women seeking an abortion are mothers, Trump is dismissing that this is a family planning and medical decision best left to women, their families and their personal beliefs. Government has no right to order women to die to save a fetus. That is a precedent that is simply absurd, and any thinking person can see why.
Legislating that a fetus has more of a right to live than a woman does is also a non-starter because that can’t be labeled “pro-life.” Republicans keep insisting this is about family, and yet they have Donald Trump – serial adulterer who has been married three times and says women “expire” after 35 – as their standard bearer.
There is no way around the fact that if a woman’s life is in jeopardy, it’s unconstitutional to order her to die to save a fetus. That is the result of making abortion illegal.
Hillary Clinton deals in facts, and she knows that many families are faced with horrible decisions later in their pregnancies. Many don’t have the money to travel to a state where it’s legal to get a late term abortion. They shouldn’t have to. They shouldn’t be punished even more for what is already a tragic situation.
Donald Trump has said he wants to punish women for getting an abortion.
Donald Trump doesn’t have the moral authority to condemn anyone for their behavior, he is an unrepentant braggart about sexual assault and a serial liar. The fact that he seeks to remove women’s right to live is beyond alarming. The fact that he doesn’t understand that his viewpoint makes him a better fit for a third world country than the U.S. is also alarming.
Those who dismiss Trump’s behavior as “locker room talk” need to face that fact that his policies are just as bad and just as dangerous for women as his sexual assaults.
But as President Obama always says, don’t get mad. Vote. If you care about women and families getting to make their own medical decisions, don’t take it for granted. Vote as if your life depended on it, because for many of us, it actually does.
Image: The Briefing
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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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