Earlier this month on Meet the Press, presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton committed the ultimate political gaffe: She blurted out the truth. When the topic of abortion came up, Clinton accidentally called an unborn baby a person. But unlike many political gaffes, hers got worse with context. She said, “The unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.”
It’s a news media moment a bit reminiscent of the recent Doritos Super Bowl kerfuffle, in which an ad showed a couple looking at a sonogram screen and the fetus reaching out for the chips. NARAL (formerly known as the National Abortion Rights Action League) and friends slammed the ad for “humanizing fetuses.” Pro-choicers attacked Clinton for the same crime: stating the obvious.
Diana Arellano, community engagement manager for Planned Parenthood of Illinois, tweeted that Clinton’s remark “further stigmatizes” abortion by calling a “fetus an ‘unborn child.’ ”