In a recent interview with Jorge Ramos, Wendy Davis dodged the question “When does Life begin?” by jumping onto a soapbox to pronounce her supposed advocacy for “protecting women’s health.” Davis’ obfuscation, as we have come to witness in recent months, is par for the course in her campaign approach, which is to re-direct attention away from facts that matter and toward, instead, answers that are often non sequiturs to the questions she is asked. Wendy Davis refuses to re-visit the abortion issues over which she had no trouble gushing for half a day in the Texas capitol building last June. Since her gubernatorial bid on the heels of that filibustering rise to fame, however, Davis changed her tune to echo more palatable issues like education, while steering clear of the A-word.
Davis’ brush-off of the question of when Life begins is reminiscent of several of her ideological predecessors, including the Supreme Court judges behind Roe v. Wade, President Obama, and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. In Roe v. Wade, the majority opinion tragically deduced:
We need not resolve the difficult question of when Life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
Likewise, during his first presidential campaign, Barack Obama responded to the question of when a pre-born child attains human rights as follows:
… whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity … is above my pay grade.
Cecile Richards responded to the question recently, fumbling her way through multiple (unsuccessful) attempts at redirecting the conversation. Ultimately, the following response was urged out of her by the interviewer:
I don’t know if it’s really relevant to the conversation. For me, I’m the mother of three children, for me, life began when I delivered them.
The same prodding interviewer dealt with Davis on the question of when Life begins, but had no luck drawing out a solid response. On the contrary, Wendy Davis served as little more than a stone wall to the question, which – in reality – is extraordinarily easy to answer.
Below is Richards' answer to the question, “when Life begins.”
