Ali Velshi Blasting Abortion Bans as ‘Christian Sharia’ Is Little More Than Vapid Sloganeering

MSNBC host Ali Velshi’s Friday appearance on SiriusXM yielded a shot at pro-lifers that should do more to harm his reputation than indict the target of his critique.

In an animated rant on Dean Obeidallah’s program, Velshi accused pro-lifers of imposing “Christian Sharia” on their fellow Americans:

It’s Sharia, right? If you’re a, if you believe that you don’t, you don’t want people to have abortion rights, but you live in America, which constitutionally says that you can’t impose a state religious belief on everybody else, but you do it. That’s actually Sharia. That’s actually what everybody else is complaining about what Sharia is. You’ve taken the Good Book and you have made that the law book. Something that Muslims never did in America or couldn’t do in America if they wanted to. That’s the wild part about this. That’s what this is. This is Christian Sharia.

As any observer of any opinion on abortion could no doubt tell, this is pandering, not an affirmative argument in favor of abortion rights.

Surely it would be useful to Velshi and others of his thinking if the only possible reason for opposing abortion was blind faith. The inconvenient truth, however, is that Americans of various faiths — or none at all — oppose abortion for a whole host of scientific and ethical reasons that pro-choice talking heads are all too happy to elide with flippant catchphrases.

It is a fact that from the moment of conception onward, a separate human organism with unique DNA is growing inside of the womb. It is a fact that at 6 weeks gestation, that human’s heart starts beating. It is a fact that brain activity begins around the same time period. It is a fact that after 15 weeks gestation, unborn children can hear their parents debating baby names. It is a fact that by week 20, they have begun kicking, punching, and sucking their thumb.

Christian opposition to abortion is not based on a mystical article of faith unique to the religion, but the ubiquitous objection to murder and a well-founded argument that that’s what abortion constitutes.

People of good faith can dissent from that characterization. They can weigh the liberty interests of the mother more heavily than those of the child. They can reject the personhood of the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy. They can argue that the real-world effects of restrictions are just too costly. They cannot, however, truthfully submit that there is no reasonable argument in favor of restrictions, or that acts of elected legislatures constitute the imposition of religious law on them.

Velshi’s rant was obviously an insult to millions of pro-life Americans of all faiths, but it was also a poor performance on behalf of his fellow pro-choicers.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.