An exchange between Rep. Eric Swalwell and Catherine Foster, leader of “Americans United for Life,” today was so surreal it borders on farce. Confronted with the now-proven case of a 10-year-old child having to travel out of Republican-controlled Ohio to have an abortion after being raped, Foster simply lied about her fake Christian ass rather than acknowledging the clear facts of the case.

If she had a moral foundation to stand on, Foster wouldn’t need to resort to bullshit in a public US Congressional hearing. Instead we get this:

SWALWELL: Do you think a 10 year old should choose to carry a baby?

FOSTER: I think it would probably impact her, her life, and so it would fall under any exception and not be an abortion.

SWALWELL: Wait. Wouldn’t it be an abortion if a 10-year-old girl, together with her parents, made the decision not to have a child following a rape?

FOSTER: If a 10-year-old girl became pregnant as a result of rape and it threatened her life, then it’s not an abortion. It would therefore not fall under any restriction on abortion in our country.

SWALWELL, to the next witness: Miss Warbelow, do you know the disinformation?

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There are of course several lies in what was Foster, so even calling it “misinformation” is too soft on that. The definition of abortion does not change depending on who has one or how strongly you might personally seek to oppose a particular abortion. Ohio law makes not making exceptions for rape, or for the health of the mother, or for the life of the mother, that’s why this child had to travel out of state. That’s all. Damn. Indicate.

Foster, at earlier points in Swalwell’s interrogation, had already referred to it as an abortion and claimed that the Ohio Attorney General would have authorized the abortion (yet another attempt at cheeky bullshit), before magically rewriting the very definition of the term “abortion” to include Not That One. And this is a dynamic already underway. Senator Josh Hawley’s wife testified at a recent Senate hearing that in the case of ectopic pregnancies, “the termination of a non-viable pregnancy” is “not an abortion”. Why not? ‘Cause you look like shit that’s opposed to life-saving treatment that everyone agrees is absolutely necessary, that’s why, and no one wants to look like absolute shit on TV . When the cameras are off, it’s a different story.

One might naively think that this effort by Foster and others is an attempt to distinguish between abortions that should not be allowed and those that should take place; by referring to “necessary” or “good” abortions as another word not yet coined, they drop all existing abortion bans and become something else. Ta-da! Problem solved! But no such definition is actually provided, and in practice dodging is used to try to get through public hearings while the laws on the ground remain the same.

In fact, the anti-abortion movement’s fury at the possibility of a 10-year-old getting an abortion when Ohio bans it anyway is only growing.

Supporters of forced childbirth, including Indiana Attorney Generalare target now the doctor who performed the procedure on that child – in case you had any doubts that those Republicans had every intention of forcing this raped child to give birth. One detail that may sadly soon become relevant: Jesse Watters, Fox News host targeting doctors, cut his teeth on the network as a fake correspondent on Bill O’Reilly’s now-canceled primetime show; O’Reilly’s most famous contribution to speech in all his rancid years was a misinformation campaign against a Kansas abortion provider, repeatedly calling him a “baby killer,” which never ended. only after an anti-abortion zealot executed this doctor in his church. Fox News’ history of being adjacent to terrorism is a long one.

Indiana conservatives are actually pushing as we speak to write laws that would have barred the 10-year-old from receiving care. They don’t want a new word that doesn’t mean “abortion”. They want the raped 10-year-olds to have children or die trying.

So yes, these people absolutely want raped 10-year-olds to be forced to give birth to their rapist’s child – or die of it. This is how laws are written. This is how laws are still written, even as Republicans and anti-abortion zealots brazenly lie, claiming laws don’t do what they clearly do and if the victim is 10 years old, it doesn’t matter. not like an “abortion” and that’s fine. They are scammers who do gaslighting and bullshit with no more morality than a dull knife. They do not care. And now they’re targeting the doctor who performed the abortion, they say it wasn’t an abortion so that the next violated grandchild will not have such access.

That’s what the far-right Supreme Court wanted. They put no language, besides notes on what misogynistic witch hunters of the 1600s might have thought of all this, differentiating between abortions and “non-abortions”. And Foster and everyone else are liars, malicious bullshit artists who don’t even care enough about the facts of every case they wade through to keep their stories straight for two minutes at a time.

Fascism is built on such lies. It is grounded in recasting both history and words so that everything the ruling far-right autocracy does can be called good and everything it opposes can be called bad. bad. We have seen it in Supreme Court cases that discard all of American history to unearth historical European errata. We saw it in the Republican attempt to overthrow the government and then, after the effort failed, to declare that the trashing of the US Capitol doesn’t even amount to something that needs a full investigation. We see it in every last thing Ron DeSantis says or does.

But the example of a far-right anti-abortion movement outright lying to all of America about the very existence of a raped 10-year-old child, then claiming that the child could have had an abortion in any state who explicitly forbade it, then stating that the child who had an abortion did not actually have an abortion but received an unknown “something else”, then targeting the out-of-state doctor who did take care of the child while the rest of those rat bastards went on with their vicious, cruel, deceitful lives – that’s what all of America will be like under fascism.

You won’t know what the laws are because they don’t care what the laws are. The laws will be what they want them to be, depending on who asks and why.