Joe Kent — the far-right Republican congressional candidate who lost his race in a shocking upset two years ago — has some thoughts on abortion. Kent believes that years from now, as a society, we will look back on the current debate over access to reproductive care in this country with horror and disbelief.
And it's hard to argue with that when there are women in Texas who, instead of being given the usual care, were forced to give birth to stillborn children. when the state of Idaho fights for the right to deny health-preserving medical care to pregnant women; when lawmakers in South Carolina, Alabama and Texas floating the possibility of the death penalty for people who seek abortions.
None of this, however, was what Kent meant. “I am completely against abortion. I think it's a stain on our humanity that it's legal right now,” Kent told the 21 Studios podcast in an interview on the floor at CPAC in 2021.
From there, he went on to compare legal abortion to American slavery: “I remember learning about slavery and learning about segregation, and I was amazed that there was a time in my parents' lives, when they weren't that old, that segregation was very real. thing. I was like, 'Man, it's crazy what happened in their lives.' And then looking back two lifetimes from that, we had slavery. And I'm like, “Man, that's crazy—that my grandparents, their great-grandparents, grew up back then.” I think there's going to be a time in our lives when we're in our 60s or 70s where our kids are going to come up to us and be like, “Well, was it okay with everyone that you could just go kill babies?” I think this is coming very soon. I think abortion is absolutely evil the way it's going on.”
During his last campaign for Congress, Kent made the slavery analogy more than once. In 2022, his opponent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, shared a screenshot in which a high school student told her that Kent had made a similar argument when he visited their school. The student wrote: “Joe Kent came to my high school and a student was curious and asked him about his thoughts on reproductive rights. He then compared it to slavery and segregation. My peers and I wondered what the correlation was and how such heinous acts could be compared to rights for women. He said this to a room full of high school students and he effectively sent the message [was] that we (girls and women) shouldn't have rights to our bodies.”
As he campaigned for re-election earlier this year, Kent tried to soften his position on abortion, posting in X, “Decision after Dobbs [abortion is] a state issue,” adding that no longer supports a federal ban for abortion. Kent's campaign manager, Flo Rossmiller, echoed that stance in an email reply to Rolling rock. “The Supreme Court has ruled that this is a state issue, and Joe Kent is arguing to keep it that way,” Rossmiller wrote.
It is worth noting that there is legal scholars who see a connection between state restrictions on women's bodily autonomy and past slavery. Michele Goodwin, Georgetown University law professor and author of the book Policing the wombhe's got written, “When states coerce and compel women, girls and people of childbearing potential to become pregnant against their will, they create human beasts and hatcheries of them. In this way, state legislators force their bodies into the service of state interests.”
Speaking recently to Rolling rock, Goodwin noted that the most onerous abortion restrictions in this country exist in states that fought to preserve slavery. “Some would say, 'Well, okay, how relevant is that?' Slavery itself was explicitly about the denial of personal autonomy, the denial of the humanity of black people,” Goodwin said. “Now, clearly, these laws affect women of all ethnicities. But the point is: If you're in a constitutional democracy and you've found a way to avoid recognizing the constitutional humanity of a particular group of people, it's something that's not lost on the muscle memory of the legislators and the courts in it. condition.”
In those states, Goodwin continued, there was never an internal reckoning surrounding this denial of rights to blacks and women. Instead, federal interventions — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Roe v. Wade — forced those states to change their practices, at least temporarily.
Meanwhile, in Washington state—where Joe Kent is running for Congress—abortion is easily accessible up to the point of viability, the former federal abortion limit. (The match is rated at this time a blast from the Cook Political Report.) In the past, Kent has said he would like to see that change, stating support for Washington's abortion ban; in addition to support for a federal ban on abortion.
His newly softened position is more in line with public opinion in Washington: 63 percent of voters opposed the Dobbs decision ending the federal right to abortion and fair 26 percent supported her, according to a poll published shortly after the decision. It's hard to say Kent would put much in the polls on this one, though.
As he told a journalist in 2022, “Until we come up with the technology to poll the unborn to see if they want a chance to live or not, there's no consensus there… This idea that we can just take the child's life and that's her choice ladies man; That just doesn't make sense.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/joe-kent-abortion-slavery-1235030528/
