Republicans embark on nationwide lying tour to hide their extreme forced birth positions

What do you do if you’re a Republican who’s spent their entire public life demonizing reproductive choice, bragging on your website how “pro-life” you are and swearing again and again how you’ll ban all abortions by imposing, quite literally the most extreme and punitive restrictions imaginable? And then, suddenly finding out that those positions can torpedo your chances of re-election, thanks to Donald Trump’s merry band of misogynists on the Supreme Court? You do what Republicans do best. You lie. You re-cast yourself as some type of “moderate,” hoping against hope that no one will notice your lies and call you out.As reported by the New York Times’ Annie Karnie and Robert Jimison, that’s what Republicans are doing all across the nation right now.With just nine weeks to go until the election, many appear to have settled on a strategy: airbrushing or at times flatly misrepresenting their records in gauzy, family-focused television ads apparently aimed at those voters.Some Republicans are claiming that they support protections for in vitro fertilization that they voted against, or that are at odds with legislation they have backed in the past. Others are vowing they would never ban abortion, though they previously said they would support doing so. One states that he cosponsored pro-woman legislation that he actually opposed.What the advertisements have in common is that they mislead voters about the positions Republicans have taken on reproductive rights and other protections for women — topics that have become politically toxic for the G.O.P. in elections across the country, particularly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.As Karnie and Jimison report, one popular tactic vulnerable Republicans are using is pretending how much they support IVF treatments, as if that were the only issue implicated by their forced-birth records of inflicting abuse and penalties on women for the temerity to wanting to control their own bodies. The problem is that many of these same Republicans are already on record supported legislation dictated to them by the rabid anti-choice lobby that supports “life at conception.”The authors cite California Rep. Michelle Steel as one of these people. Steel had co-sponsored a “Life at Conception” act that would have granted “personhood” status to fertilized eggs, then scrubbed her name from the proposed law after she won her GOP primary. She claimed she had been “confused” by its language and didn’t realize it applied to IVF treatments. Never mind the fact that the whole point of such laws is to ban (and ultimately criminalize) all abortions. She wasn't "confused" about that.Another flip-flopper is New York’s Rep. Anthony D’Esposito who previously went on record on a news website, saying he’d “probably” support a 15-week ban. Now he claims he’d “never” support a “national” abortion ban, and his spokesman points to his support for bipartisan IVF legislation. As Karnie and Jimison report, yet another, Iowa’s Mariannette Miller-Meeks, claims she signed onto her party’s “Life at Conception” Act only so she could change it later (apparently with her remarkably all-powerful legislative prowess).Karnie and Jimison report that Florida’s Sen. Rick Scott has also joined the Lying Circus, touting his newfound support for IVF treatments in an ad aired one day after he voted against legislation introduced by Democrats ensuring its access. He defended his vote claiming “religious” reasons for his opposition, apparently with the intent to suggest that a clinic presumably employing Evangelical Christians could force them to violate their sincere religious beliefs by doing what they were hired to do.Some of these Republican liars sidestep the issue altogether, by making ads that they believe show their support of women in other ways. Karnie and Jimison cite CA Rep. Mike Garcia, who claims he supported the Violence Against Women Act, but conveniently omits the fact that he opposed it when its re-authorization came up as part of President Biden’s 2022 spending package. The reason he and his colleagues opposed it? As Karnie and Jimison report, because it also provided protections for LGBTQ+ people and contained language requiring the government to be notified when a convicted domestic abuser lies on a background check when he tries to buy a gun.The authors note that Garcia co-sponsored an alternative GOP bill that omitted the above provisions and would have re-authorized the VAW for another year. That bill, as they report, went nowhere. But what a prince Mr. Garcia is! The takeaway from these examples simple: When Republicans start bragging or making ads about how much they’re helping or supporting women, they’re doing it to hide something else — usually something terrible — that they’ve already done.