Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Both Suffered from Talking Points Disease When They Discussed Abortion in their Third 2016 Debate

Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003

A couple weeks ago, I posted about the Talking Points Disease. This terrible disease happens when politicians spew out standard conservative or liberal talking points even though they know nothing about the topic. My example was of Senator Mike Lee, who gave a preposterous speech in the Senate in which he made fun of the Green New Deal for things that the Green New Deal didn’t say.

     

There are more ridiculous talking points about abortion than any other topic, and it’s been quite a while since I have heard any liberal or conservative politician say anything intelligent about the topic. Mostly, the two sides just mindlessly repeat talking points. Let’s hearken back to the third presidential debate in October 2016, in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both suffered from Talking Points Disease.

       

Debate moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump a question about Roe v Wade. That is the famous Supreme Court decision that allowed women the right to abortions during the first two trimesters of pregnancy. Trump said he was against it.  Clinton made a careless mistake when she brought up late-term abortions, which Wallace hadn’t asked about. I assume that late-term abortions were part of her prepared abortion statement and she repeated it without thinking. (That’s one way that Talking Points Disease gets started.) Lashing into her, Trump then repeated the conservative talking points that we have all heard many times:

     

“Well I think it is terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby. Now, you can say that that is okay and Hillary can say that that is okay, but it’s not okay with me. Because based on what she is saying and based on where she’s going and where she’s been, you can take baby and rip the baby out of the womb. In the ninth month. On the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”

As we'll see in a minute, that was a completely wrong statement. 

Trump said to turn the abortion issue back to the states.

Clinton then gave an uninformed response in which she just repeated talking points. She said, first, that “well that is not what happens in these cases.” She was right there; it isn’t what happens. She said that Trump was using “scare rhetoric.” That was also true; Trump was using scare rhetoric. Clinton then said: “This is one of the worst possible choices that any woman and her family has to make. And I do not believe the government should be making it.”

Now, that is the standard liberal talking point: abortion is a woman’s decision. She said that it was a horrible choice that women might face. That was true, but beside the point.  Here’s why: neither Trump nor Clinton seemed to know that Roe v Wade did not legalize third-trimester abortions! Roe v Wade leaves the states free to regulate late-term abortions. Really, any well-informed citizen should have known better, much less someone who wants to be president.

     

Worse, neither Trump nor Clinton seemed to know that Congress had passed and President George W. Bush had signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which prohibited partial-birth abortions. The law's sponsor was conservative Senator Rick Santorum.

 

That was inexcusable. If you want to be president of the United States and if you want to talk about abortion, you should be prepared to talk about basic abortion law. In other words, Roe v Wade did not legalize the horrible things that Trump talked about and Congress had already passed a law that criminalized partial-birth abortions. Trump said something that was utterly ignorant, and Clinton, who liked to act as if she were smarter than Trump, didn't seem to know any more about abortion than he did.

Trump and Clinton repeated standard talking points that they had heard and on which, I imagine, their obviously incompetent staffs had briefed them. But neither of them had done the basic research and all they really did was to display their ignorance. They were unprepared and both made elementary mistakes that would get them bad grades in any college debate class. Abortion is a hard issue. Careless, ignorant thinking does not help us solve it.

For a public speaker, there is no substitute for in-depth knowledge. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato explained that in his beautiful dialogue Phaedrus and no one has ever shown him wrong. In my younger days, I was an active high school and college debater and, later, a college debate coach. We were taught that research was the secret to good debating. The side that could prove its points usually could set the agenda and win the debate. Trump and Clinton knew the talking points—but talking points are a shortcut. There is no substitute for doing the research.

Talking Points Disease is bad for a democracy’s health.

P.S. Here’s more information about the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.

P.P.S. Clinton and Trump are both capable of giving good public presentations. Their outlandishly bad debates in 2016 were not among them. Interested readers can use the search box on the right to see what else I have said about these two prominent speakers.

I was fortunate enough to contribute a chapter about social media usage during the 2016 presidential debates to Ed Hinck’s important two-volume set about presidential debates. The books are expensive, but many large libraries should have a copy. My fellow William and Mary debate team member John Morello also wrote a chapter. What can I say? Speech and debate teams are a great opportunity.