Georgia gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams has suggested that women need to terminate pregnancies to cope with soaring prices
Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is shown campaigning on Tuesday in Jonesboro, Georgia. © Getty Images / Megan Varner
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has pushed back against the notion that the Democratic Party is overly focused on abortion rights at a time when voters are most concerned about inflation, suggesting that terminating pregnancies is a way for women to cope with high prices.
“Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas, it’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs,” Abrams said on Wednesday in an MSNBC interview. “For women, this is not a reductive issue,” Abrams said. “You can’t divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child.”
Democrats have seized on abortion rights as a hot-button issue since the US Supreme Court earlier this year overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, ruling that the US Constitution doesn’t protect the right to terminate a pregnancy. President Joe Biden has vowed that Democrats will enact legislation codifying Roe v. Wade nationally if the party is able to retain control of both the House and Senate in next month’s congressional midterm elections.
Abrams made her comments in response to a question from MSNBC commentator Mike Barnicle, who claimed that abortion isn’t nearly as pressing a concern for voters as day-to-day challenges like being able to afford groceries and gasoline. The US inflation rate is hovering near a 40-year high and has surged sixfold since Biden took office in January 2021.
“Let’s not pretend that women — half the population, especially those of childbearing age — they understand that having a child is absolutely an economic issue,” Abrams said. “It’s only politicians who see it as simply another cultural conversation.”
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Conservatives blasted Abrams for defending abortion as a way to weather inflation, rather than proposing economic policies that would enable more Americans to have children. “I can’t believe this needs to be said, but ending a human life is not the solution for inflation,” said Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Congressman Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, called Abrams’ comments “demonic.”
The controversy comes less than three weeks before the November 8 midterms. “I didn’t really expect Democrats to go with, ‘You know, it’s cheaper to feed your family if you kill a few of them’ as a closing argument,’ yet here we are,” National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin said.
Georgia’s gubernatorial race is a rematch of the state’s 2018 election, when Abrams lost to Republican Brian Kemp. Abrams and other high-profile Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have claimed, but failed to prove, that the election was stolen from her through voter suppression. She has been portrayed as a “rising star” by Democrats and was chosen to give the party’s response to then-President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February 2019.
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