South Bend mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg demonstrated once again that he marches to a rather warped brand of Christian theology. As the Hollywood elite joins hand-in-hand to boycott the state of Georgia for passing a fetal heartbeat bill that bans abortions once doctors can detect a baby’s heartbeat in the mother’s womb, the South Bend mayor has denounced the newly-acted law as a “cruel attack” on women.
According to LifeNews, Buttigieg denounced the law in a tweet last week shortly after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill.
“A woman has enough to deal with when it comes to her health care without also having to worry about male politicians telling her what she ought to do with her body,” Buttigieg wrote Thursday. “Georgia’s abortion ban is a cruel attack on women’s autonomy and freedom — one that we must continue to resist.”
Buttigieg characterizing the law as some kind of affront toward women ignores the fact that Gov. Brian Kemp’s popularity surged in the state as the fetal heartbeat bill journeyed toward his desk. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Gov. Brian Kemp’s approval ratings are on the upswing after a legislative session dominated by his embrace of an anti-abortion measure, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows. …
The poll shows 46% of registered Georgia voters have a favorable impression of Kemp as he nears his third month as governor, 9 points higher than the 37% rating he tallied in the AJC’s January poll as he was sworn into office.
He’s outpacing [President] Trump, who was the model for Kemp’s campaign. About 40% of Georgia voters approve of the president, statistically unchanged from 38% in January. Nearly 56% of Georgians disapprove of Trump, compared with Kemp’s 39% disapproval rating.
As noted by LifeNews, Buttigieg also ignores the fact that some of the heartbeat bill’s biggest sponsors were women. In fact, “four of the seven major sponsors of the legislation were women including the lead sponsor in the Senate, Senator Renee Unterman.” Unterman, a woman, even hailed the law’s passage in the upper chamber of the Georgia legislature as the “pinnacle of her legislative career.“
“I adopted two children and only by the courageous abilities of those birth mothers to give up those children,” Unterman said at the time. “That was my journey that started me on being so pro-life.”
Buttigieg characterizes himself as a moderate even though he has adopted some of his party’s most extreme views on abortion. When defending his stance on the practice of late-term abortion, Buttigieg chalked the moral argument down to it all being a woman’s “personal decision.”
“The way I explain this and it’s something that I think any pro-choice candidate from a conservative state faces, and that is I respect and understand where others are coming from. Many of my supporters, many of my friends view this issue differently,” the mayor said on MSNBC. “But we’re talking about who gets to make that decision. And the way this has been characterized, especially lately, is asking questions that almost in themselves are misleading about the medical situations that women face – not to mention the personal decisions that they are confronted with.”
“To me, it’s a very complex issue that should be guided by a very simple principle: which is that having these things dictated by the government does not make that decision any easier,” he continued. “Some of these questions are religious or meta-physical, they’re not things that are knowable in a traditional sense, not questions you can get the answer.”