On the night of Christmas -- as millions of American Christians celebrated the birth of a savior to a troubled mother -- the PBS News Hour thought it was a tremendous occasion for a one-sided discussion on...abortion. The godless tone-deafness was something to behold.
PBS was sharing a piece of their new podcast Settle In, and the guest was pro-abortion activist/journalist Irin Carmon and how she reported on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Anchor Amna Nawaz explained her new book Unbearable "tells the stories of five women in New York and Alabama as they navigate a new post-Roe landscape."
The opportunity for states to outlaw or limit the killing of babies was, to Carmon, treating women like animals and diminishing their humanity -- and obviously, with that world view, the unborn child doesn't have humanity, killing them isn't diminishing anything.
Nawaz helpfully asked Carmon to explain her statement from the book about "how incomplete our story of American reproduction has been and how much has been unexpressed, hidden or taken for granted."
IRIN CARMON: I think, for me, when I -- the real inspiration for writing this book, the actual moment, even though in some ways I was leading up to it in my entire career of reporting, was being pregnant. I was six months pregnant for the second time when Roe v. Wade was overturned with the Dobbs decision and I was eight months pregnant when the decision was finalized.
And for me, one of the stories that I wanted to tell -- I was covering the decision as a reporter at New York magazine. I was writing about all the implications for policy and for law and the dynamics of the decision and the holding.
But I was also feeling in my bones what it would mean for this profound change in American law and life, how it would actually affect people. And I did not need an abortion. I did not seek an abortion. I was really excited to be pregnant. But I also found myself thinking, why hasn't anybody talked about how what an enormous physical and grave undertaking pregnancy can be in the context of even when you want to and what it might mean to force this on someone?
I don't think nobody talks about it, but for me it was something that I felt in my bones. I felt it in my blood. I could feel like in the extra heart that was beating inside of me, that there was a profound erasure from that opinion in particular and from the way Alito wrote about it of the seriousness of pregnancy, regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in.
So one of the parts that I thought was incomplete and inexpressed is that you might think of yourself -- unexpressed -- is that you might think of yourself as never needing this kind of care, right? And there are women in the book who I write about who never thought they would be in this situation --
AMNA NAWAZ: Right.
CARMON: -- and find themselves seeking a kind of care that is stigmatized, that is illegal, that is secret, or that they will be punished for one way or another.
And so it felt like the best way to tell that story was to -- I started a little bit by weaving in my own personal story, even though in many ways it's not an extraordinary one, but I think the very fact that for me as a married, white, upper-middle-class, privileged woman who literally reports on this for a living, the feelings that I had of being made to feel smaller or less than a fully adult human in control of my own decisions during my pregnancy were so instructive for me.
Because I thought, like, what chance does anybody who doesn't have all this going for them have in this system that says that the moment you become pregnant you have fewer constitutional rights, you have fewer rights of autonomy in medicine, you will be treated like, to quote one of the women in my book, a child animal?
And that's not to diminish the fact that my pregnancies and many other people's pregnancies were deeply joyful and I was excited about them, but that's not a reason to diminish the individual pregnant person's humanity.
On "public" broadcasting, the usual night for this kind of leftist advocacy is on January 22, the Roe v. Wade anniversary, where they would annually avoid covering tens of thousands of protesters at the "March for Life" in favor of putting all their "compassion" on the abortion advocacy. But to do this on Christmas night is a little astonishing.
