“Good luck to them trying to defend their extreme position.  Every one of them voted for what I call the ‘Chinese genocide bill’ which would allow for abortion up ’til moments before a child takes its first breath,” National Republican Committee Chairman Tom Emmer, a Congressman from Minnesota, claims in a field trial of an already failing branding effort of pro-choice Democrats.  “I think our candidates know how to message that and they’ll be just fine in the midterms.”

The ham-handed way Republicans are trying to frame the debacle of revoking bodily autonomy–while simultaneously preparing attacks on LGBTQ marriage, access to contraception and privacy in one’s sex life–by tying it to the Chinese is not just cynical, it shows how shallow and fetid the GOP arguments for rescinding personal rights are.

Third trimester abortions are exceptionally rare:  less than 1% of all abortion performed.  And they’re typically done so because the expectant patient found the fetus had a significant birth defect.  One of the last major papers to study late term abortions, from 2005, found that one-fifth of late term abortions were performed because the patient received a faulty test result which covered up an abnormality in the fetus that would have resulted in a short life or life-long deformities or handicaps.  (In other words, prenatal testing missed genetic abnormalities.).