NBC Capitol Hill correspondent Ali Vitali concluded her guest hosting of MSNBC’s Way Too Early on Wednesday by welcoming Shefali Luthra, health reporter for The 19th News, to promote her new book, where Luthra claims that the left’s position that pro-lifers simply seek to control women is not just a lazy opinion, but a fact confirmed by “research.”
Vitali was all for the conclusion, “I want to read something that I read in your book. You say ‘it wasn't until 1880 that every state had passed laws criminalizing abortion, a shift that was less about religion and more a product of a campaign orchestrated by a male-dominated medical establishment.’”
Opening up the floor to Luthra, Vitali continued, “You say that ‘it's in part to consolidate power and weaken the credibility of the midwives’ who were typically women who often helped people terminate their pregnancies. I'm interested in, as you dug into the history, on how these policies came to be. It wasn't just about gender from a biological standpoint, it was about gender from a societal standpoint too, right?”
Luthra claimed that “This was so striking to me. I found that research fascinating. The idea that abortion should be restricted didn't come from medicine, from religion, from politics. It really did come from what you often hear: this narrative of control. This narrative of power and abortion was seen as something quite normal in a lot of the 1800s, in a lot of our country's history. I wrote in that book that the right to abortion is as old as our country itself, if not older and that has stayed with me.
Even if one grants that Luthra is correct about the history, she has not disproved the premise underlining pro-life beliefs. Furthermore, one would think the self-styled Party of Science and “progress” would appreciate how opinions can change.
Luthra also lamented, “This is something that has become a fight that seems inescapable in the past couple years, even in the past 50 years ever since Roe was decided, there were efforts to overturn it. But for most of our time, it wasn't that way. It was something people did because they viewed it as a way to control their reproductive health and family planning destinies.”
The only question that matters in the abortion debate is whether the fetal and embryonic stages of development are simply other parts of life akin to infancy, adolescence, or adulthood or not. Everything else is just noise, which is what MSNBC prefers because they think it benefits Democrats and because it can’t actually refute pro-life logic without tying themselves into a pretzel.
Here is a transcript for the May 22 show:
MSNBC Way Too Early with Jonathan Lemire
5/22/2024
5:57 AM ET
ALI VITALI: I want to read something that I read in your book. You say “it wasn't until 1880 that every state had passed laws criminalizing abortion, a shift that was less about religion and more a product of a campaign orchestrated by a male-dominated medical establishment.” You say that “it's in part to consolidate power and weaken the credibility of the midwives” who were typically women who often helped people terminate their pregnancies. I'm interested in, as you dug into the history, on how these policies came to be. It wasn't just about gender from a biological standpoint, it was about gender from a societal standpoint too, right?
SHEFALI LUTHRA: This was so striking to me. I found that research fascinating. The idea that abortion should be restricted didn't come from medicine, from religion, from politics. It really did come from what you often hear: this narrative of control. This narrative of power and abortion was seen as something quite normal in a lot of the 1800s, in a lot of our country's history. I wrote in that book that the right to abortion is as old as our country itself, if not older--
VITALI: Yeah, yeah.
LUTHRA: -- and that has stayed with me. This is something that has become a fight that seems inescapable in the past couple years, even in the past 50 years ever since Roe was decided, there were efforts to overturn it. But for most of our time, it wasn't that way. It was something people did because they viewed it as a way to control their reproductive health and family planning destinies.
