Mika Brzezinski Asked For Evidence New Jersey Allows Abortion Up to Birth — Here It Is

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski scoffed at former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s suggestion that his state allows abortion through nine months of pregnancy on Tuesday morning.

While making the case for state-by-state regulation of abortion law during an appearance on Morning Joe, Christie compared states with more restrictive statutes to New Jersey, which he said allowed “abortion up to nine months.”

“Okay, it’s not an abortion at nine months,” asserted an exasperated Brzezinski, “and there’s not a doctor that would do it, and it only happens in extremely severe circumstances. You can come back and bring me the evidence of women across the state of New Jersey having abortions in the ninth month. It’s not happening, Chris, come on.”

“You said this the last time you were on and I let it go, I can’t let it go again,” she added. “There’s no abortions in the ninth month.”

If that’s true — if no one would ever consider an abortion in the later stages of pregnancy — why did New Jersey’s state legislature pass and governor sign a bill ensuring that abortions could be performed at any stage of pregnancy last year?

The 2022 Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act argued that “governmental restrictions on reproductive choice, by their very nature, impinge on the constitutional right to reproductive autonomy” and included a provision stating that “Any law, rule, regulation, ordinance, or order, in effect on or adopted after the effective date of this act, that is determined to have the effect of limiting the constitutional right to freedom of reproductive choice and that does not conform with the provisions and the express or implied purposes of this act, shall be deemed invalid and shall have no force or effect.”

Where and when it’s convenient to do so, progressives will readily admit to the meaning of the statute.

AbortionFinder.org tells the truth unequivocally, assuring those who are “in New Jersey and need an abortion” that “there is no ban or limit on abortion in New Jersey based on how far along in pregnancy you are.”

So does the Philadelphia Inquirer, Axios, and a little start-up by the name of the New York Times.

Now, it is true that the vast majority of abortions provided in the United States are performed in the first trimester, during which a majority of Americans favor an unencumbered right to end pregnancies.

Yet when the number of abortions performed in the country on an annual basis is high, the raw number of late-term abortions — which Americans emphatically oppose — can still be dispiritingly high.

The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute estimates that approximately 930,000 abortions to0k place in the United States in 2020. A previous estimate from the same organization pegged the proportion of abortions performed after viability at about 1.3%, which would mean that somewhere around 12,090 late-term abortions were performed in 2020. Compare that number to the 13,620 gun homicides recorded by the FBI that same year and you might begin to understand the problem.

Would any Democrat eager to tout the rarity of late-term abortions in America be similarly eager to shrug off the number of Americans victimized by gun violence?

Brzezinski’s exasperation with Christie for merely citing legislation championed by Garden State progressives puts a spotlight on the inconsistencies between those working for pro-choice advocacy groups, elected pro-choice politicians, and thinly-veiled activists in the media.

The first group states outright that they will accept no limitation as legitimate and pushes for a maximalist position.

The second largely agrees with with the first and pushes toward that goal legislatively, but understands that the position is a political liability and rhetorically softens their language.

And the third — this is where Brzezinski’s contrived riot act comes in — keeps the public in the darks about the radicalism of Democrats’ position with a laundry list of excuses, obfuscations, sighs, and rolls of the eyes.

They want to have their cake (ultra-permissive abortion policy) and eat it (profess moderation) too.

All of this plays out to the frustration of pro-life advocates and elected Republicans, and rightly so. But it also should provoke anger from a broader public that so many in the media do not respect enough to trust with the truth.

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