A recent guest on MSNBC said that the mindset of pro-life advocates, who stand outside abortion clinics usually praying and offering compassionate assistance to women, is virtually indistinguishable from the ideology of a “suicide bomber.”
Jill Colleen Jefferson, a civil rights attorney, appeared on the network’s “Politics Nation.” She maintained that both sidewalk counselors and militant jihadists believe they have “the moral duty to mess up somebody else’s life.”
Jefferson began the segment on MSNBC by saying she opposed lynching and the taking of innocent black lives. The host, Al Sharpton who is a civil rights icon for many, then focused the topic on abortion.
“As we talk about civil and human rights in Mississippi, I want to mention the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about a currently blocked state law that would ban all abortions after 15 weeks,” Sharpton said. “The heavily poor, young, and black women stand to lose access to the only abortion clinic in the state. Sounds as much about civil rights as abortion rights to me.”
Jefferson replied: “Yes, this is a matter of civil rights. Having the right to an abortion is a constitutional right; it’s grounded in the right to privacy that is within the Constitution. And I find it really interesting that part of this argument is an argument about, you know, ‘the right to an abortion is not explicitly listed in the Constitution.’ But you know what? Neither is the right to bear arms. The way that we interpret that law is the interpretation of a constitutional provision, the Second Amendment .. yet we’re not applying that same logic to the situation.”
This is when Jefferson made the leap to compare Right to Life advocates with terrorists. “What it reminds me of, quite honestly, is a suicide bomber — someone who feels like they have the right and the moral duty to mess up somebody else’s life for the greater good.”
It did not take long for those in the pro-life movement to call the comparison outrageous.
Ryan Bomberger, the co-founder and chief creative officer of The Radiance Foundation, said this to The Daily Wire: “To compare pro-lifers, who compassionately work to save the lives of the unborn and their mothers, to maniacal suicide bombers who intentionally kill everyone around them shows she has no honest or thoughtful grasp on human rights.”
He added: “You can’t fight the inhumanity of lynching while embracing the inhumanity of abortion. Sadly, this is exactly what civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson does.”
Bomberger noted that Jefferson made her ignorant comments on the exact anniversary of Emmet Till’s lynching. He described that as “an evil act carried out by those who had zero regard for his life because of his color.”
And he zeroed in on his point regarding abortion: “In 2018-2019, there were more black lives taken by the (racist/eugenic) violence of abortion than were killed nationwide in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the violence of lynching.”
There was a total of 117,626 black babies were aborted in 2018, according to the CDC’s most recent abortion account. And Bomberger drew attention to the fact that Jefferson displayed “a peculiar lack of knowledge of the actual constitutional ‘right to bear arms’ while defending the non-existent right to kill another human being (born or unborn).”
The Second Amendment states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” The Supreme Court clearly defended this position in its 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case, “There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms,” which is “unconnected with militia service.”
In contrast, the Supreme Court based the right to abortion on the “right to privacy,” which the court discovered just eight years earlier in Griswold v. Connecticut. For the first time in Supreme Court history, Roe v. Wade made the case that abortion fell under the newly discovered “right” to “sexual privacy.”
Legal scholars across the political spectrum have said the ruling lacks sound legal reasoning.
Unfortunately, Jefferson’s comments add her to the growing list of liberals who have compared conservative Christian Americans to the Taliban in recent days.
Joy Reid, of MSNBC, shared a tweet that stated, “The Republicans … are actively working to strip women of their freedom to vote and to make reproductive decisions. They’re more in line with the Taliban than Democrats on women’s issues.”
And freelance journalist Feminista Jones said just this week, “Always funny to me when [Christians] pretend their religion is somehow less oppressive of women than Islam [laughing my a** off].”