Wendy Davis, the Texas Democrat who took to the floor of the state senate to filibuster a ban on late-term abortions performed after 20 weeks, is pleading ignorance about the gruesome horror stories of Kermit Gosnell's abortion biz. Speaking to the Weekly Standard, Davis also managed to get in a nice jab at the majority of American women who support a ban on such procedures, insisting they "don't really understand" the issue. Nice, huh?
(Image: Getty)
My friend John McCormack got the scoop in a brief interview Monday following Davis' appearance at the National Press Club:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Senator, you mentioned in there that you support whatever the federal law is on late-term abortion, but there really isn't a set [federal] policy, it's state-by-state. So is there any week-limit that you could support? If it were two weeks later--SEN. WENDY DAVIS: You know, those conversations are the kind of conversations that could and should be taking place if we didn't see such extreme positioning. But unfortunately our Republican colleagues weren't interested in having reasonable conversations like that.
TWS: The supporters of these bans, they argue that there really isn't much of a difference between what happened in that Philadelphia case with abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell [killing born-alive infants] 23 weeks into pregnancy and legal late-term abortions at 23 weeks. What is the difference between those two, between legal abortion at 23 weeks and what Gosnell did? Do you see a distinction between those two [acts]?DAVIS: I don't know what happened in the Gosnell case. But I do know that it happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn't going to make a difference. The state of the law obviously has to assure that doctors are providing safe procedures for women and that proper oversight by the health and human services department is being given. It sounds as though there was a huge gap in that oversight, and no one can defend that. But that's not the landscape of what's happening in Texas.
TWS: What do you make of polls showing that a majority of women support these late-term bans? There have been a few polls--Washington Post, Huffington Post, different polls--that show women support this. What do you think of those polls?
DAVIS: I again think that a lot of people don't really understand the landscape of what's happening in that arena today and what an incredibly small percentage of procedures take place there, but, ah...
