Congressman: Pro-Life Republicans Should ‘Never Run’ from ‘Love and Compassion’

In the opening seconds of President Joe Biden’s first reelection campaign video, the third image that appears (after two shots of the January 6 riot) is a woman holding a sign that reads “Abortion Is Healthcare” in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The video serves as a template for what appears to be the Biden campaign’s two-pronged reelection strategy: to paint Republicans as “extremists” and to characterize abortion as a matter of “personal freedom.”

At a campaign stop earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris stated that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 amounted to a “health care crisis,” and insinuated that the pro-life movement is made up of “extremists.”

But as observers have pointed out, a clear majority of the American people are not on board with the Democratic Party’s own position of refusing to set any limits on abortion, even up until the moment of birth (or immediately after), paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

“[T]he most recent Marist poll couldn’t be clearer that by a margin of two-to-one, people want restrictions on abortion,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) underscored during Thursday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “There’s a great deal of support for legislation to ensure that taxpayers do not fund abortion. And yet, Joe Biden, the abortion president, has integrated abortion into every single policy that he’s able to do by executive order. And he’s trying to legislat[e] abortion until the moment of birth … the children would have no protection whatsoever.”

Smith went on to argue that the Democrats should be the ones who are considered extreme on abortion in light of the fact that House Democrats passed the Women’s Health Protection Act twice on a party-line vote in 2021 and 2022, a bill that would strike down almost 1,400 pro-life bills enacted between 1973 and 2022 by mandating that abortions must be legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy.

“[T]he Democrats have already passed that bill twice in the House of Representatives until we took over as Republicans,” he noted. “But if they get back [the] House, Senate, and the White House, [they] will ensure that these babies are utterly killed by dismemberment, beheading, by chemical poisoning, or that pill which actually starves the baby to death. I mean, these are gruesome acts that need to be called out. And yet you have a president who just talks in slogans … about ‘reproductive rights.’ There’s no right to decimate the life of an unborn child.”

Smith further highlighted the work of pregnancy resource centers that provide pregnant women in need with resources in order to aid them in raising their children, contending that pro-life Republicans should focus their rhetoric on drawing attention to their work.

“[T]he most recent March for Life … did a wonderful job [highlighting] the pregnancy resource centers — 2,700 of them — that provide great support and love and compassion and no judgments to the women and help them through their pregnancies if they are contemplating an abortion,” he observed. “So that’s where the emphasis should be, on non-violent alternatives like pregnancy care centers.”

In response to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) recent comments that the upcoming election is about “freedom” from pro-life protections, Smith was unequivocal.

“There’s no freedom to butcher a child,” he affirmed. “There’s no freedom to behead a child. And every one of the surgical abortions behead the child. And the later that child is in his or her gestational age, the more gruesome it actually is to behold. … So, you know, they talk in euphemisms. This is Orwellian doublespeak on the part of the other side. They do it all the time.”

Smith concluded by urging pro-life politicians to run toward the unborn in their arguments instead of away from them. “Pro-lifers need to assert with love and compassion respect for both mother and baby, and to do it consistently. Never run from this. … We’re going to win this. And the polls show that when we articulate a message of life, people rally around it.”