Ann Coulter’s Not Worried About Abortion Screwing Up the Midterms
BUCK: We’ve got best-selling author and columnist Ann Coulter with us now. Her latest piece is up at ClayAndBuck.com: “Alito Will Save Lives, Not Biden.” Ms. Coulter, great to have you back.
COULTER: Good to be here. Hello.
BUCK: It feels like for a lot of people what we’ve been finding out in the last few days is for those who did not know, there is a large part of the left that on this issue is really completely insane. I mean, Tim Ryan — Clay and I have been talking about this — wants to be the senator from Ohio. He’s asked straight up, “Month nine of the pregnancy, abortion, what do you think?” He says go for it.
COULTER: Yes. And even Mr. You know, super Catholic, pro-life Democrat, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, and… I don’t know if you remember, but for decades that’s what Biden was famous for, being the Democrat who was the least enthusiastic about abortion. And yesterday the White House press secretary says he supports abortion up until the moment of birth. It’s probably also worth mentioning that all these polls you see, “Oh, majority of Americans support Roe.”
It’s like the majority of Americans support “gun control.” Can I see the question? (laughing) It’s always like, “Do you support reasonable gun regulation?” Well, yeah, sure, of course. “Oh, they support gun control!” Same thing with Roe v. Wade. People don’t know what they’re answering. When it gets the tiniest bit of specificity, it turns out — according to the New York Times, not according to the Right to Life — two-thirds of Americans oppose abortion after the first trimester.
CLAY: Yep.
COULTER: That’s 12 weeks; the law at issue that’s gone up to the Supreme Court is 15 weeks. The law just passed — pushed through and passed — by Governor DeSantis signed into law by Governor DeSantis in Florida, 15 weeks. And how many abortions take place after the first trimester? Eight percent. So, that’s we’re talking about here. And, at first, as I say in the column, that is actually true, after hating Roe v. Wade both as a lawyer, as all lawyers do.
It’s just a completely, intellectually offensive decision. They wanted abortion and said, “Oh, look, we dropped some LSD and hallucinated it into the Constitution.” As you know, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg said this is a BS decision. “I would find a right to abortion in this other provision or maybe it’s this provision. Oh, who knows! We’ll pull it out of our butts.” So just intellectually, forget any moral issue being adamantly opposed to this decision and then of course as a normal human being who doesn’t think you’re allowed to go around killing inconvenient human beings.
I’ve been writing and talking against abortion back before it was cool, in high school, and college and law school. (laughing) So, you know, yes, millions of babies are being massacred every year, but I did think when I first saw the leak, “Oh, crap. This is gonna ruin the midterms for Republicans,” and then after about 10 minutes, I realized as I go through in the column, “No, it really isn’t. It really isn’t. Read the decision.” You cannot not read Alito’s decision — and I am now insisting to liberals.
If you’re going to rant about this decision, show me the part of Justice Alito’s opinion that you disagree with. (laughing) Show me anything that’s not blindingly logical and rational. And, no, this… I mean, all we get is this parade of horrible of, “Oh, and now they’re going to ban interracial marriages! There will be forced sterilizations!” (laughing) No. No. I mean, as Alito says in his opinion — I’ll probably write about this next week.
At the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment — which is, as you know, is where we get the privacy right and from the privacy right all these other rights that, yes, are not specified in the Constitution but they’re considered, you know, part of order and liberty. At the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment, abortion was not only not a right in any of the 50 states (laughing), it was a crime in all 50 states.
And then Supreme Court comes along and says, “Oh, what you think is a crime is a constitutional right,” and watching MSNBC, which has been kind of fun since the leaked draft came out — and, gosh, I hope God willing that will be the final draft. I remembered, they really are loons, the proponents of abortion. And the crazy arguments they’re making and the hysteria they are leveling, I noticed, as I mentioned in the column, everything I wrote…
Everything I write generally is true. Not only I, but I talk to some of my friends. I was expecting, ’cause we were all talking about it Monday night. The next day I’m going around, I’m running into women, liberal women, different ages of women, I have friends who work with, all kinds of ethnicities and different groups of women, and I called all of them. Nobody was talking about this decision! (laughing) It’s an obsession with the New York Times and MSNBC.
But most people, A, don’t really care, and, B, they’re right not to care. Because, as I say (laughing), we’re talking about 8% of abortions. I promise you, you will be able to abort a child up until about age 13 in the states of New York, Illinois, California. More than half the nation will not be affected whatsoever by this decision. You can get a bus ticket to one of those states. So it’s really… We really are seeing the looniest fringe of the left in response to this decision, and I am no longer worried about this screwing up the midterms.
CLAY: Ann, I had some conversations last night. I was talking to, trying the same as you, to get a bunch of different opinions from people from a variety of perspectives. And what sort of rang true to me almost immediately is pro-choice or pro-life are very much branding opportunities. And when you actually drill down, a lot of women and men have very similar opinions. For instance, the vast majority of people think that aborting a baby in the ninth month is not just wrong, that it’s murder.
COULTER: Yes.
CLAY: And that is people who are otherwise saying, “Hey, I’m pro-choice.” You start to dial back with them and you say, “What about seven months, eight months?” and they’re queasy at the whole idea and they consider themselves to be pro-choice. Similarly, there’s very few people who say, “Hey, I don’t believe birth control should be legal,” or, “I don’t believe that exemptions should exist when a mother’s life is at risk or a rape or an incest,” a tiny percentage of those but even pro-life people are saying, “Hey…” In other words, there’s a lot of reasonableness when people actually drill down on the specifics.
COULTER: Yes.
CLAY: So, to your point.
COULTER: The only —
CLAY: Yeah?
COULTER: Go ahead.
CLAY: No, I was just gonna say, if we went with 15 weeks, that seems eminently reasonable and rational, to me, to a large extent. And, to your point, it also still gives people plenty of time to make a choice but also, I’m kind of blown away that this is considered as polarizing as it is because when you dial down, most people agree on most of these issues.
COULTER: Yes. And that’s why it was outrageous for the Supreme Court to reach out and create a legislative answer.
CLAY: Yes.
COULTER: When you’re a court, you’re supposed to be deciding, is this court — is this law constitutional or is it not? They’re not supposed to be writing law. But I guess issuing cultural legal — quote, “legal” — rulings for the entire country is more fun than deciding tedious antitrust cases. And the most egregious example of this of course is the Roe v. Wade case. One caveat I would add because I think it’s important for people to know this:
The rape and incest exceptions, yes, perfectly reasonable. The issue with those are that, who is it who’s deciding this? I mean, are we going to have a tribunal? Is every girl going to say, “Oh, yeah, this was rape?” The decider is the, quote, “doctor,” i.e., the abortionist, which is why a lot of states are hesitant to throw in those exceptions and, as in Mississippi and Florida, for example, no, they say, “Yes, life of the mother or life of the fetus,” if the baby isn’t going to survive has some sort of physical deformities. But you know if you’ve been raped, you know if you’ve been the victim of incest.
CLAY: Good point.
COULTER: (laughing) You got four months, and that’s well past the first trimester.
BUCK: Ann, just want to ask you —
COULTER: Whatever — as I mentioned briefly in the column, which I don’t really see people talking about, whatever happens to the morning-after pill?
CLAY: Yeah.
COULTER: If you’ve been raped, you take the morning-after pill. There’s been a lot of advances in science since Roe v. Wade. Why are you, “Well, I was raped, and I’m just gonna…” How about venereal disease. Are you gonna get tested for that? You’re just gonna sit around for six months and wait until you notice the baby bump? (laughing) I mean, I just don’t think that’s how people live their lives.
BUCK: Ann, real quick, the leaker, I think you and I have had a similar take on this one publicly. I don’t know why everyone’s pretending like that is going to be the greatest manhunt — or woman hunt as the case may be — in the history of the U.S. legal system. I think they’ll find this person at some point, maybe, and they’ll maybe get fired from the Supreme Court and then they’ll get a book deal. Like, they’re not going prison, nothing terrible is going to happen to them, and, in fact, they’ll probably be a hero to the left.
COULTER: Well, depends who leaked it. As I said in my column, if it turns out it was a conservative, the person will be disbarred, will never get a job in the legal profession — as should happen in any case — will be ruined for life. And if it’s a liberal, yeah, it will be a book deal and a gig on MSNBC. But what should happen, no, it’s not a crime.
But, wow, I’ve been listening to liberals wail about “Attack on our norms! Attack on democracy!” for, what, four years now? No, this really is… This is egregious. All lawyers know how egregious this is. The Supreme Court certainly knows. And there ought to at least, at the absolute minimum, be a disbarment.
CLAY: Ann Coulter, fantastic stuff. Well, you can check out that column, AnnCoulter.com. We’ll talk to you again soon. Appreciate it.
COULTER: Good to talk to you. Bye-bye.
