Right-wing talk radio and BlazeTV host Steve Deace told his listeners yesterday that he believed the debate on abortion in the United States was shifting in favor of those who seek to criminalize abortion procedures.
In the last week, state legislatures in Alabama and Georgia passed laws that seek to ban abortion procedures with bills that anti-abortion activists hope will trigger the Supreme Court to overturn of Roe v. Wade. With regard to the Alabama law, even Religious Right pastor Pat Robertson suggested it was too extreme to succeed in overturning Roe. During yesterday’s episode of BlazeTV’s “Steve Deace Show,” Deace argued that a string of “organic” stories about abortion in the national news cycle was evidence that the tide was turning in favor of anti-abortion activists. He employed various metaphors to describe how momentum compounds in one direction, and he said that current momentum favored the anti-abortion movement.
“It kind of feels like that’s happening right now on the life issue,” Deace said. “I’m affirmatively sensing it as much as I negatively am. What do I mean by that? If you’re wondering in a game or in any contest, ‘You know, it feels like we have the momentum, but do we?’—you know who will tell you? Your opponent will. Your opponent will tell you.”
Deace said the evidence that those who oppose anti-abortion laws were signaling a loss of momentum was obvious: the failure of actress and activist Alyssa Milano’s “sex strike” hashtag stunt, people he said were arguing about giving fetuses voting rights, and an aggressive condemnation of a recently passed law in Alabama from one of the state’s Democratic lawmakers. These public moves, Deace theorized, were signs that anti-abortion activists are making real headwind on their agenda.
“The hardest thing to do when you sense things are going against you is to maintain your composure and to maintain your poise. They have lost all their composure on the other side of the debate,” Deace said.
“The truth of this is, they just want to be able to kill these children. That’s it. It’s nothing else other than they just want to kill these kids. That’s all,” Deace said. “We’re coming to a head here on this in some way, shape or form.”
(This story was updated at 12:45 p.m.)
