How a Pro-Choice Celebrity Responded When a Lawmaker Asked Her About an Abortion Survivor
Tony Perkins /
E! may have canceled her show, but actress Busy Philipps isn’t complaining. Maybe now she’ll have more time for her real passion: lobbying Congress for infanticide.
Tuesday morning, the former “Dawson’s Creek” star was on Capitol Hill explaining why abortion survivors—like the one sitting three seats away—had no business being born.
While the states pass wave after wave of pro-life legislation, House Democrats have been desperate to do something (since blocking born-alive protections 52 times apparently isn’t extreme enough).
They decided on a hearing, “Threats to Reproductive Rights in America,” in Rep. Jerry Nadler’s, D-N.Y., Judiciary Committee. They invited an NYU law professor, a liberal doctor, an ACLU attorney, and Philipps—who’d come forward last month about an abortion she’d had at 15.
“If I were that teenage girl in Arizona today,” she complained, “legally, I would have to get parental consent. I would be forced to undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound, to go to state-mandated in-person counseling … then take a state-mandated 24-hour timeout to make sure I really knew what I wanted. And finally, I would be forced to give the state a reason why. Well, here is mine: My body belongs to me.”
Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, listened to her story, and when it was time to question the witnesses, he turned to Philipps and forced her to think about the woman barely 6 feet away.
“Would you agree that somebody who has survived an abortion, like Melissa Ohden, has a right, once she’s born to life, to control over her body where someone else doesn’t take her life?”
Philipps fired back glibly, “Although I played a doctor on television, sir, I am actually not a physician.”
Obviously, Gohmert replied. “But you’ve given very compelling testimony and you’ve obviously given these issues a lot of thought.”
Philipps paused, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”
What about the choice between a baby and her doctor, he asked.
“I’m not speaking about birth, sir, I’m speaking about abortion,” she answered.
And that’s exactly the problem. Liberals like Philipps and the rest of the chamber’s Democrats think infanticide isabortion. Another “choice” that, as far as Philipps is concerned, “should not be legislated by strangers … “
“I am so sad,” the actress said at one point, “that we have to sit here in front of a row of politicians and give deeply personal [stories], because the ‘why’ doesn’t matter.”
That’s incredible. What she should be sad about is that there are 60 million people who can’t sit there because of “deeply personal stories” that cost them their future.
Ohden would have been one of them, if it weren’t for the grace of God.
“It’s easy to talk about reproductive rights,” she said when it was her turn, “until you recognize that without first the right to life, there are no other rights. How do you reconcile my rights as a woman who survived a failed abortion with what’s being discussed here today?”
“I’m alive today,” Ohden told everyone in that room, “because someone else’s ‘reproductive right’ failed to end my life.”
But, as Philipps posted on social media, tragedies like that don’t make her sad.
” … [B]abies dying from separation at our own border make me very sad. ALSO! Babies being viciously murdered by guns in their own classrooms makes me so F***ING SAD.”
But a newborn child thrown into a bucket of burning solution to die doesn’t.
“There’s something very wrong when one person’s right results in another person’s death,” Ohden insisted. “There’s something deeply disturbing about the reality in our world that I have a right to an abortion, but I never had the simple right to live.”
If you agree, join our End Birth Day Abortion Campaign and send Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a newborn baby hat. Help us remind House Democrats that there are thousands of children just like Ohden, who all deserve the chance we had—to live.
Originally published in Tony Perkins’ Washington Update, which is written with the aid of Family Research Council senior writers.