The debate on abortion must go beyond pregnancy to improving parenthood so children have the best chance at life.
Kamala Harris touted herself as a champion for abortion in Tuesday’s debate, framing this life-and-death issue as a basic freedom. She told viewers she would “be a president that will protect our fundamental rights and freedoms, including the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.”
This theme of abortion as “freedom” has run throughout her campaign, placing so-called abortion rights above the right to life and moving far beyond the former Democrat position of abortion being “safe, legal, and rare.” Tim Walz stands firmly with Harris, famously declaring: “We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves, because we know there’s a golden rule, mind your own damn business.”
But Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg raised an interesting question: What does “reproductive freedom” mean for men? Speaking at a “White Dudes for Harris” event, Buttigieg encouraged men to support Harris because he said abortion benefits them. He argued that “men are also more free in a country where we have a president who stands up for things like access to abortion care.”
Buttigieg is right that abortion is a men’s issue — but not for the reasons he thinks. In law, men today have no freedom of choice when a woman is pregnant with the unborn child they helped create. It may feel like freedom if a man agrees with a woman’s choice to end the life of her unborn child, but it’s entirely different if the man and woman have different views on their unborn child’s future. Hunter Biden’s ongoing parental fight demonstrates this well.
Lunden Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s child Navy Joan Roberts, shared her struggle to have her child recognized by the Biden family in her new book Out of the Shadows. Though Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection, the Biden family’s response to this child’s existence — and the deafening silence by Democrat Party leaders throughout the Biden administration — raises deep questions for Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party on just what they mean by “reproductive freedom.
