In a bizarre and frenzied rant Monday evening, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo blasted pro-life Americans as racist haters of science over their attempts to challenge the legal precedents behind abortion rights established in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade.
Cuomo, obviously irked by the Supreme Court’s decision to hear a Mississippi case this fall which could result in a major rollback of abortion rights, vented on his primetime show that conservative challenges to abortion laws are “not really about science” but are merely political tactics used to divide people and distract from real policy reform.
The case set for consideration is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It concerns a 2018 abortion law passed in Mississippi that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, which critics say is before the fetus becomes viable, or is able to survive outside the womb.
In the state’s petition to the court, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch argued, “It is well past time for the Court to revisit the wisdom of the viability bright-line rule.”
A legitimate question to be posed, one would think. But Cuomo saw it differently.
“You would think that we would have impaneled experts on a special commission by now to see what the science says, right, but we don’t seem to have the intellectual curiosity about this issue,” the progressive anchor said on his CNN show.
“Because it’s not really about science — it has become a culture war. It’s a political lever to use as a distraction from policy and solving problems, to allow people to get up in their religion and their righteousness,” he continued.
CUOMO: Opposing abortion is “a political lever to use as a distraction from policy and solving problems.”
Abortion… https://t.co/YEikREQPEF
— NewsBusters (@NewsBusters)1621305525.0
“It’s not about science or consensus,” Cuomo went on. “It’s about dividing lines, legislating to the far-right white-fright vote, flooding the zone with 536 bills that abridge a woman’s right to control her own body, in 46 states.”
“It’s just like voting rights in one way,” Cuomo strangely charged, comparing the effort to limit abortions to Republican state voting initiatives in places like Georgia characterized by progressives as racist and the “new Jim Crow.”
During the rant, Cuomo even seemed to push back against his own perspective by arguing that science may be on the side of the pro-life movement.
He noted that modern “medical capabilities may be moving the point of viability well short of what it was assumed to be in 1973 with Roe v. Wade,” a point which was in fact elucidated in Mississippi’s petition to the Supreme Court.
