As the fight over abortion rights plays out across the U.S., Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is doubling down on her extreme anti-abortion rhetoric.
Last week, Boebert posted a video to her Facebook page attacking abortion with extremely graphic images purporting to show aborted fetuses.
Facebook later put a “sensitive content” warning on the video, leading Boebert to accuse the company of censorship.
“Big tech is censoring my abortion video,” Boebert, a Republican, wrote on Twitter. “Seeing pictures of aborted babies is ‘offensive’ because dismembering children is offensive, disgusting, and evil. Once you see what abortion is, you can choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you didn’t know.”
Facebook’s sensitive content warning only stops the video from immediately playing and gives users the option to view the video after seeing the warning.
“I rise to say what we all know to be true that human life begins at conception,” Boebert says in the video, adding, “because we know science is real.”
There is no scientific consensus regarding when life begins.
“Abortion is not health care, it is murder,” she said.
The tactic of using graphic fetal images is often employed by anti-abortion activists, particularly outside of abortion clinics, and remains controversial even within the anti-abortion movement. These images are sometimes used inaccurately or taken out of context.
“Planned Parenthood can go fund themselves,” Boebert concluded in her video, repeating a phrase that’s become her personal anti-abortion tagline despite the fact that in Colorado, Planned Parenthood hasn’t received federal funding for decades. In January, as one of her first bills in Congress, Boebert sponsored a bill to block funding to Planned Parenthood and other health centers across the U.S. that provide a range of reproductive health services to low-income patients and perform abortions. In general, federal funding cannot be used for abortion due to the Hyde Amendment.
Boebert’s most recent anti-abortion tirade comes as Congress prepares to vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), which would enshrine abortion rights into federal law and protect them from what appears to be the U.S. Supreme Court’s intention of overturning Roe v. Wade.
This recent push for WHPA, which is likely to pass the U.S. House of Representatives but faces a tough path in the U.S. Senate, was sparked by the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to block an abortion ban in Texas. The court announced yesterday that it would hear arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which concerns a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks a presents another direct affront to Roe, on December 1.
Boebert indicated her support for overturning Roe by signing on to an amicus brief last month in support of the Mississippi law that explicitly asked the court to do away with the constitutional right to an abortion.
Earlier this month, Boebert criticized the Biden Administration’s lawsuit against Texas, conflating anti-vax sentiment with the “right to choose.”
