The way Democrat presidential candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke sees it, Planned Parenthood “saves lives.”
The failed Senate candidate from Texas lauded the abortion provider during a campaign stop in Nevada on Thursday in response to a question about his support for late-term abortions.
Claire, a Planned Parenthood supporter and student, asked O’Rourke about what he would do if elected about the “lies being spread about abortion later in pregnancy.”
“How would you protect a woman’s right to access safe and legal abortion?” she asked.
“I’ll try to find that common ground, and I’ll tell you how I did it in Texas,” O’Rourke said. “I talked about going to every county, no matter how red, how conservative, how Republican, and giving the same message and talking about a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her own body by connecting it not just to the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, but the lives that we are losing today in this country as we’ve shut down all these family planning clinics in my home state of Texas.”
Despite clinics closing, abortion providers still manage to end the lives of about 60,000 babies each year in Texas alone, according to Politifact.
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s biggest abortion provider, literally ends the lives of more than 320,000 children every year, Live Action reports.
Regardless, O’Rourke believes “we’ve made it so hard for women to just get any kind of healthcare at all, including access to a legal, safe abortion.”
Fewer abortions, according to O’Rourke, equates to death.
“No one wants to see people die in the wealthiest and most powerful country on the face of the planet for a lack of care. So when I connect the fact that family planning clinics, Planned Parenthood to be specific, in Texas saving the lives of our fellow women, and it’s a life and death matter in this country,” O’Rourke preached, alluding to maternal mortality.
“Three times as deadly for women of color in this maternal mortality crisis we have right now. I think I can find some common ground to ensure that we see the larger picture in our national public shared interest going forward,” he said.
“So, I’ll make sure I respect those with different points of view, that I’ll listen to everybody, that I’ll share what I just shared with you, but never compromise on the fundamental principle that healthcare also means every woman makes their own decisions about their own body and that will be the test for anyone we nominate to the Supreme Court,” O’Rourke said.
Maternal mortality, or complications in late pregnancy leading to the mother’s death, occurred at a rate of 26.4 for every 100,000 live births, according to NPR.
The most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate the abortion ratio at 188 abortions per 1,000 live births, though many believe the figure is low.
O’Rourke’s nonsensical argument that Planned Parenthood “saves lives” follows similarly odd life and death policy positions he’s staked out in the crowded Democrat primary for 2020.
In December, O’Rourke made the argument that the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border is killing people.
“The wall in this area was built in 2006, 2007 and 2008,” O’Rourke said at a town hall in El Paso, The American Mirror reports. “So even though total crossing attempts had decreased, the number of deaths went up.”
“The number of people dying at the U.S.-Mexico border in some years has grown,” O’Rourke said at an El Paso town hall. “In some years has grown because it’s connected to that wall that we have already built that pushes people who at their most desperate and vulnerable to ever-more inhospitable stretches of the Chihuahua Desert.”
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