Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is trying out an...interesting message about the importance of November’s midterm elections.
According to HuffPost, Scott wrote in a Monday fundraising email (emphasis his): “If we don’t take back the Senate, Dems will pack the courts, give DC statehood, grant abortions up to 52 weeks, and Republicans will never win again.” HuffPost shared a screenshot of the email.
Let’s hold off on the wild abortion claim for a second and address his predictions about November. Currently, Democrats are slightly favored to keep control of the Senate, but are projected to lose the House of Representatives. If Republicans win the House, they would not pass court reform or statehood for Washington, D.C., so even if Democrats did somehow pass those bills in the Senate, they would not end up as law.
Anyway, back to abortion: Pregnancies last 40 weeks on average. Scott’s email suggests that Democrats want to legalize “abortion” up to 52 weeks—about 12 weeks after the average person gives birth. And that would be murdering a baby that is roughly three months old—not an abortion. Maybe Scott got confused with the number of weeks in a calendar year?
Either way, by press time, his office had not responded to Jezebel’s question about whether he knows how long pregnancy lasts.
Without hearing from Scott it’s hard to know what he was trying to say here. But it shows that Republicans are grasping at straws to paint Democrats as the extreme party on bodily autonomy. All evidence points to the fact that Americans broadly disagree with Republicans’ stance of banning abortion and criminalizing providers—especially now that there is no federal backstop after the fall of Roe v. Wade. The spectacular failure of last week’s anti-abortion ballot measure in Kansas is just the latest example showing that Republicans are the extreme ones who are out of step with mainstream opinion—but that won’t stop them from spouting insane lies about their political opponents in the coming months and years.