With the Republican assault on women’s reproductive rights reaching new heights of extremism with the obviously unconstitutional near-total ban on the procedure just passed by the Alabama state legislature, even reliably conservative evangelical Christian “pro-life” advocates are beginning to think that the GOP strategy may backfire on the party and their attempts to restrict access to pregnancy termination under any circumstance.
Pat Robertson, the televangelist and chairman of the Christian Broadcast Network, surprisingly expressed his concerns that the new Alabama bill — still waiting for a signature from Republican Governor Kay Ivey — is too extreme to accomplish the goal that its sponsors hope to achieve with the legislation, a reversal of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision that enshrined women’s reproductive freedom as the settled law of the land.
The Alabama legislation — which bans abortions at every stage of pregnancy and subjects doctors who perform the procedure to felony penalties of up to 99 years in prison — makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.
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With only cases where the life of the expectant mother is in danger not subject to the prohibition, Robertson feels that the Alabama bill will hurt the anti-abortion cause.
“I think Alabama has gone too far. They’ve passed a law that would give a 99 year prison sentence to people who commit abortion. There’s no execption for rape of incest. It’s an extreme law and they want to challenge Roe vs. Wade, but my humble view is that this is not the case we want to bring to the Supreme Court because I think this one will lose,” Robertson said in a televised interview.
In acknowledging the right-wing goal to overturn established judicial precedent in regards to women’s reproductive rights, Robertson demonstrates the danger that Republican-controlled state legislatures pose to women’s access to abortions nationwide.
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With GOP lawmakers across the country seemingly attempting to outdo each other in passing increasingly restrictive regulations on abortion providers in a slow chipping away at the constitutional protections in the Supreme Court’s decision, the fact that even the most ardent opponents to abortion rights are calling their efforts extreme show how dangerous the Republican policies truly are and how hard progressive women and their male allies need to fight back against them.
You can watch a clip of CBN Chairman Pat Robertson’s remarks on the Alabama abortion legislation in the video below.
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"It's an extreme law": Pat Robertson says that Alabama's anti-abortion law goes too far and will most likely lose at the Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/lDuteweasq
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 15, 2019
