(First Things) — A Harris-Walz presidency would be noteworthy not simply for the extremity of their abortion and gender policies, but also for the fanatical zealousness with which they pursue them. With no close contender, theirs would be the most anti-life, anti-woman, and anti-family presidency in the history of the country. Unborn and unwanted newborn children would be exterminated. Women would be reduced to objects for the sexual satisfaction of men. Women-only spaces would be eradicated. And parents would lose authority over the medical care of their own children.
In a CNN interview on July 24, Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren declared that Kamala Harris’s “biggest accomplishment” as vice president has been the “way that she has rallied women . . . around this country on the issue of abortion, and just taken it home.” Harris was “the first vice president in history to visit an abortion clinic. Go get ’em!” she gushed.
Warren was alluding to Harris’s January 2024 “Reproductive Freedom Tour,” which included a stop at a Minnesota Planned Parenthood abortion mill that Harris disingenuously called a “health care clinic.” Harris was conspicuously accompanied at the abortion center by her now-running mate, Tim Walz, whose record on abortion is even more extreme than Harris’s.
In her tour announcement, Harris complained about “extremists” who “wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms.” She has advocated using the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act to force hospitals to abort children in states where abortion has been regulated or banned. Harris has mimicked President Biden’s repeated assertion that the Democratic Party wants to “codify” Roe v. Wade, threatening to use federal power to prevent states from protecting unborn human life. In Pennsylvania, she asserted that laws protecting unborn life are “immoral.”
Harris has a loyal soldier in her running mate. As Minnesota governor, Tim Walz has been no less committed to the sacred cause of killing unborn—and, failing that, neonatal—children. In January 2023, he signed Minnesota’s no-limit abortion law, boasting at the signing ceremony, “[W]e’re the first state to take legislative action to put these protections in place” following the Dobbs decision. No abortion law could be more extreme than Minnesota’s, as it permits abortion at all stages of pregnancy for any or no reason.
Even worse, Minnesota law now expressly legalizes infanticide. The prior law had required medical professionals to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant” after a botched abortion. In May 2023, Walz signed a bill that replaces that language. Now, personnel are merely required to “care for the infant who is born alive.” They are no longer obligated to preserve the “life and health” of the infant, which can be left to die from exposure or starvation. This is no different from a woman killing her newborn after a natural delivery.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has joined the chorus of Harris and Walz’s pro-abortion fervor, declaring he is “so glad” that abortion is the theme of her campaign. Saying the quiet part out loud, Buttigieg enthused that “Men are . . . more free in a country where we have a president who stands up for . . . access to abortion.” In other words, men are liberated from the consequences of their irresponsible sexual behavior when women can be pressured or coerced into getting an abortion.
Buttigieg’s endorsement of Harris’s pro-abortion zealotry calls to mind one of Pope St. Paul VI’s dire predictions in Humanae Vitae. The pope wrote that through ready access to contraception (and, failing that, abortion), men will “forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires.” This is precisely the effect of Harris and Walz’s dehumanizing abortion policy. In addition to advocating the extermination of unborn children, it reduces women to objects for the sexual gratification of men.
Abortion is not merely a policy matter for Harris and her party. Rather, it is the interpretive principle through which the party sees all politics. Policy matters are viewed through the anti-marriage, anti-life, and anti-fecundity hermeneutic of sterility. Through this hermeneutic, abortion is a proxy for a ghastly agenda to commodify human life. It is to be prevented, manufactured, or disposed of at whim. (Planned Parenthood is offering free abortions and vasectomies at the Democratic National Convention this week.) What human life is not, however, is the natural result of a self-giving relationship between a man and woman.
The cruelest irony is that the United States is facing a crisis of fertility. In 2023, the number of children born in the U.S. was the lowest number since 1979. The fertility rate was 1.62 births per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1. According to the Wall Street Journal, this is the lowest rate ever recorded since the federal government began tracking the data in the 1930s. If this trend continues, an aging population will strain social welfare programs to the point of collapse. Many factors contribute to this birth dearth, of course. But the anti-life, pro-death policy advocacy of the Democratic Party is certainly one of those factors. And regardless of its causes, American political leaders should be encouraging the birth of children, not their extermination.
A Harris-Walz administration would also work to federalize fringe gender ideology. As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed an executive order preventing psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental and behavioral professionals from practicing medicine, under the subterfuge of prohibiting “conversion therapy.” Rather than exploring the causes of gender dysphoria, Minnesota health-care professionals must accept the self-diagnosis of confused adolescents and teens and affirm their confusion.
The executive order is consistent with other extremist trans-ideological measures that Walz has signed into Minnesota law, even to the extent of meddling with other states’ laws. In April 2023, he signed a bill making Minnesota a “trans refuge” state. Minnesota physicians may perform mutilating surgery on out-of-state minors and administer puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy. In other words, under Tim Walz, the State of Minnesota may revoke parental rights of parents living in other states and assert custody over their children in order to perform irreversible surgeries and chemical alterations.
Under Walz, Minnesota schools are required to put feminine hygiene products in boys’ restrooms. While some media outlets have claimed this is a distortion of the law, the mandatory language of the statute is very clear: “A school district or charter school must provide students with access to menstrual products at no charge. The products must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12 according to a plan developed by the school district” (emphasis added). And, of course, the phrase “menstruating students” is consistent with Walz’s broader misogyny. Driven by fringe trans-ideology, he has overseen Minnesota laws erasing women and taking away women-only spaces.
Tim Walz’s folksy, down-home, “aw-shucks” demeanor makes these policies even more grotesque. Coupled with Kamala Harris’s well-established hostility to faith-based institutions and policies, the Harris-Walz ticket is the most extreme in American presidential political history. They both reside in the farthest fringes of leftist policies and politics and are abortion and gender ideology fanatics.
Kenneth Craycraft is author of Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America. First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.
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This article was originally published at First Things and reprinted here with permission.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not represent an official position of Alpha News.
Kenneth Craycraft
Kenneth Craycraft is author of Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America.
