Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tried to score a few brownie points with abortion supporters Saturday when he tweeted an insulting old line about men and abortion.
“If men were giving birth to babies, there would not be a lot of discussion regarding the right to choose,” the pro-abortion Sanders tweeted on Saturday.
Abortion advocates and pro-abortion politicians have been repeating some variation of that line for years. It likely originated with feminist Gloria Steinem who once said abortion would be a “sacrament” if men could get pregnant. A 2012 Saturday Night Live episode even used the line “abortion clinics would be like a Starbucks” if men could get pregnant.
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The line is extremely insulting on several levels, and it shows how sold-out Sanders is to the abortion movement. He makes a vast, unfair assumption that if men became pregnant, most of them would want to abort their unborn babies. It’s a very sexist thing to say, and people on both sides of the abortion debate called out Sanders for the tweet:
@sarekins @BernieSanders so you think men are more willing to kill kids than women?
— Ryan Kiblinger (@ColtsFan254) December 6, 2015
@daniikaaa21 @BernieSanders I’m pro choice but that’s dumb
— Marty McFly Williams (@Jdaddywhatsgood) December 6, 2015
Pretty sexist of you, @BernieSanders, to assume only women are capable of murdering their offspring. https://t.co/ts0qPLZBa1
— Eric Spencer (@JustEric) December 7, 2015
@BernieSanders totally disagree – taking a life is taking a life regardless of who is doing it
— John Quesenberry (@coachq) December 6, 2015
The remark is equally bad because tries to rectify one problem by trying to justify another. There is a real problem with responsibility and parenting in our society. Sometimes, women are unfairly burdened when men abandon, abuse or neglect them and their children. Some men even pressure women to abort their unborn children so that they don’t have to be responsible.
Abortion advocates want to make the situation “equal” for men and women by allowing women to abort their unborn babies. As one person on Twitter wrote, “its a metaphor showing the inequality between men and women. Men always have the right why don’t women.”
But two wrongs don’t make a right, as another old saying goes. Just because some men are irresponsible fathers doesn’t mean that women also should be encouraged to be irresponsible by aborting their unborn children. Abortion isn’t a solution. It’s just another wrong answer that creates even more problems for the whole family.
Finally, the remark fails to acknowledge the inequality of fathers’ rights when it comes to abortion. Some men want to be responsible fathers but are denied the ability to protect their unborn child from abortion. There are many hurting fathers whose partners aborted their unborn babies against their will.
We could debate rights and inequalities between women and men all day, but the truth remains that the person whose rights are trampled on the most is the unborn child.
Sanders and so-called women’s rights advocates would do better if they started offering real solutions to families – ones that don’t end in the death of their most innocent, vulnerable members.
