Flap between 2 SC Republicans raises an important unanswered question about abortion | Opinion

A question I’ve asked many pro-life conservatives but have never gotten a satisfying answer: If abortion is murder, why not treat everyone who actively participates in the procedure like a murderer?

In every other circumstance, we treat someone who commits premeditated murder, well, like a murderer.

I raise the question again because of a recent development in a fight between Republicans to represent South Carolina House District 6 in Anderson County. It illustrates the untenable, yet revealing, position the Republican Party has adopted nationally.

Challenger Kyle White made a political video about opponent April Cromer’s contradictions and it included a doozy.

White says of Cromer, an incumbent S.C. state representative, in the video: “You also mentioned that you voted to protect life, but what you neglected to mention was that you also supported women who have abortion being prosecuted for murder,”

It’s true. Cromer co-sponsored a bill so radical that it went nowhere in one of the most right-wing male-dominated legislatures in the country. Republicans and Democrats condemned it.

Called the “South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023,” the bill said an “unborn child who is a victim of homicide” should have equal protection under homicide laws in the state. It defined an unborn child as a person at any stage of development.

In South Carolina, the penalty for a murder conviction can include death by firing squad or the electric chair. Cromer, and other co-sponsors, have since pretended they had nothing to do with the bill.

On Mother’s Day and “as a proud mother of two,” Cromer claimed on X that she was “proudly pro-life and have supported equal protections for the unborn. But I have never and would never advocate for punishing women. That’s not who we are as a community.”

To be frank, that’s just a flat-out lie. The bill she sponsored, had it become law, would have opened up women who had abortions to decades or life in prison — the death penalty. That can be chalked up to cynical politics, with those elected to represent us breezily telling falsehoods to regain or retain power.

Cromer isn’t the first to tell easily disprovable lies during a campaign, but that doesn’t impress me much.

It still doesn’t answer my original question. If “pro-lifers” truly believe abortion is murder, why wouldn’t they want to treat those involved like murderers? Why not enact the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023 instead of disavowing it? Murder a 3-month-old newborn, you will be arrested, charged and face a long stint in prison, maybe not death row. If you believe a 3-month-old fetus is a full human being, why wouldn’t you want the same to happen if that fetus is aborted?

Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for N.C. governor revealed that he had his wife made the decision to have an abortion three decades ago, though now he says abortion is wrong. He also said society will “feel the wrath of God” because abortion is acceptable. Nowhere did he say he should have been treated as an accessory to murder.

Donald Trump, presumptive GOP nominee for president, has been inconsistent on abortion but recently said it should be left up to the states. In no state is murder legal. Even if the state refuses to prosecute, the federal government would.

Sen. Lindsey Graham stands firm in his belief there should be a national abortion ban. Even that ban would allow “murders” to take place for at least 15 weeks during a pregnancy.

That’s one of the reasons we can’t have a serious grappling across the ideological and political divide about abortion in the U.S. The rhetoric is overheated and purposefully misleading, which is what we saw from the three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices who uprooted a half-century precedent that was Roe v. Wade. If pro-lifers really believe abortion should be curbed because it is murder, they should proudly and openly stand on that conviction. If not, they should stop pretending it is a conviction at all.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.