(John McCann, Headline USA) As the fight over Roe v. Wade has intensified, civility and nuance on the issue has quickly become non-existent. With justices’ homes becoming targets by organized leftist mobs, spurred by Democrat leadership, the situation has continued to escalate.
Since the sudden leak of Justice Samuel Alito‘s draft majority opinion, which showed the court ready to overturn Roe, liberals on Twitter have combed through the document to find any quotes or statements that might give them ammunition. One quote that has been making the rounds has been attributed to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
The quote in question has been framed by opponents as an example of Barrett’s pro-life bias, with her purportedly claiming that the U.S must maintain a “domestic supply of infants,” according to the Western Journal.
There is one big problem: Barrett did not state such an opinion. In fact, none of the justices made such a statement. The quote was footnoted within Alito’s draft and has been attributed to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from 2008.
The report stated that “[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.”
Barrett was not speaking of human infants as mere commodities; the CDC was just noting that the high demand for adoptions was not being met by the supply.
Certain “fact checkers” argued that while the quote may not be attributed to Barrett, people may have “conflated” it with comments Barrett made during oral arguments regarding “safe haven laws.”
Falsehoods and misinterpretations such as these have aided in making the Roe v. Wade debate a toxic discussion. Smearing a justice for something she did not say has only created fodder for abortion advocates and has muddied the waters of an already complex issue.
