Whoopi Goldberg, one of the co-hosts of “The View,” claimed Wednesday the reason abortion exists is because people “got tired of tripping over women in bathrooms with hangers in their body.”
She said abortion — and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade — came about not for religious reasons, but because the procedure needed to be “safe and clean.”
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“Here’s the deal,” Goldberg said. “Abortion did not come around for religious reasons. The reason abortion came about is because people got tired of tripping over women in bathrooms with hangers in their body, OK? This was always supposed to be about safe and clean.”
The 65-year-old actor said people’s respective relationships with God are private and have nothing to do with abortion laws.
“This idea that you are making hay out of a law that doesn’t affect you, because it doesn’t say, ‘Listen, if you get pregnant, you better go and have an abortion,’” Goldberg said. “It doesn’t say that. It says, ‘If you find yourself in a situation that you can’t handle, perhaps you go and talk to your family and then you all decide what you are going to do.’”
The segment centered on a newly enacted law in Texas that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before most women are even aware they are having a child.
Last week, the Supreme Court declined to issue an injunction against the law, which, rather than empowering officials to take action, authorizes private citizens to file civil lawsuits against those who aid in the procurement of a now-illegal abortion. Filers are eligible for up to $10,000.
Goldberg said abortion laws like the one in effect in Texas are a result of men getting angry because women “have not been listening” to what they have been telling them about what they should do with their bodies.
It’s worth noting Goldberg’s coat hanger claim is difficult to prove.
In 2019, The Washington Post gave then-Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen four “Pinocchios” for claiming repeatedly that, prior to the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, “thousands of women died every year” as a result of botched, back-alley abortions.
Fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted at the time that any statistics from the pre-Roe days would be unreliable, because unplanned pregnancies and abortions were considered by most of society to be “deeply shameful.” Additionally, given it was illegal to terminate a pregnancy, “official statistics were not necessarily reliable indicators of mortality rates from abortion.”
Kessler concluded Wen’s claim that “thousands” of women died as a result of illegal abortions to be based on “shoddy data.”
“Even given the fuzzy nature of the data and estimates,” he wrote, “there is no evidence that in the years immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s decision, thousands of women died every year in the United States from illegal abortions.”
Also during the segment on “The View,” former Republican Utah Rep. Mia Love, who was serving as a guest host on the ABC talk show, argued women should be given “more options when it comes to reproductive health.”
Describing herself as pro-life, except in cases of rape, incest, or the safety of the mother, Love suggested over-the-counter birth control options would be more effective than “condoms and Plan B.”
“I don’t think government should be going into families when it comes to making a decision about such important issues that are damaging to women,” she said. “So here’s what I think: Why not treat women like assets that can be developed instead of liabilities that need to be managed?”
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