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Abortion advocates issue reality check after Mike Pence says abortion will end ‘in our time’

Does the vice president think no one had abortions before ‘Roe v. Wade’?

Photo of Samantha Grasso

Samantha Grasso

Mike Pence at 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, next to a tweet lambasting his abortion comments.

Vice President Mike Pence made some weirdly confident and seemingly ill-informed assertions about the future of abortion on Tuesday, and the internet is calling bullshit.

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At a luncheon hosted by anti-abortion election group Susan B. Anthony in Nashville, Tennessee, Pence predicted that legal abortion would end in the U.S. “in our time.”

“I know in my heart of hearts this will be the generation that restores life in America,” Pence told the luncheon’s attendees. “If all of us do all we can, we can once again, in our time, restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”

Pence’s comments aren’t at all surprising, given his anti-abortion record as former governor of Indiana. However, his belief that the end of legal abortion somehow “restores the sanctity of life” seems to completely ignore the dangerous, life-threatening procedures women who do not have access to legal, safe abortions will undergo to induce an abortion.

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Studies have shown that criminalizing abortion doesn’t stop them from happening, and that the rate of abortion in countries that criminalize them is higher than in countries where abortion is legal. According to the Guttmacher Institute, an estimated 200,000 to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed in the 1950s and ’60s, decades before the 1973 Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion. In 1965, an estimated 200 women died from illegal abortion complications, with illegal abortion accounting for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year.

It would appear that Pence’s psychic powers have no concept of the past, which his premonition would force us to repeat.

Across Twitter, abortion access advocates lambasted the vice president’s “prediction,” flat-out rejecting the mere thought of criminalized abortion.

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Others criticized Pence’s total disregard for women and his inability to understand how criminalizing abortion will only cause abortion-seekers to turn to desperate measures.

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https://twitter.com/emilylhauser/status/968602110257442816

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https://twitter.com/TwainIAint/status/968849695979253760

But some took Pence’s sour assertion and turned it into idealized future for all people—that, hey, maybe legal abortion will end because the U.S. will have unlimited access to contraception and accurate sex education!

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https://twitter.com/rachelbusygrl/status/968741310642507776

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Pence, who has a history degree, really tried with this one, but you can’t rewrite past.

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The Daily Dot