A CNN contributor and former New York City official claimed on May 6 that “when a woman is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her.”
Christine Quinn, former Speaker of the New York City City Council, made the claim during an appearance on Chris Cuomo’s show.
The remark came during a discussion of the “heartbeat” bills passed in some states, which protect unborn children starting at around six weeks into pregnancy from abortion. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the latest “heartbeat” bill into law on May 7.
“Christine, what’s the concern with what just passed in Georgia, and what you may wind up seeing more of, a state passing through its legislature, a more restrictive right to reproductive acts such as—reproductive rights such as abortion?” Cuomo asked Quinn. “This is a six-week bill.”
“They, for all intent and purposes, are an end run around Roe versus Wade, and a clear attempt to make abortion illegal in new—across the country,” Quinn said. “That’s what they are. And we’ve seen in states where they’ve been passed already, courts strike them out or enjoin them. This is a clear attempt to take decisions about a woman’s body and birth out of the hands of a woman and out of the hands of doctors.”
U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, the other guest on the show, soon asked Quinn and Cuomo about the procedure of abortion. “You realize a baby dies in an abortion. Do you realize that? Are you ignoring that fact? That’s a reality. This is a human life,” he said.
Cuomo, an open liberal, said: “That’s not a legal fact.”
After a debate of several minutes, Quinn made the comment that, “when a woman is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her.”
Santorum reacted with disbelief when Quinn made the claim, saying, “That’s a lie.”
He later asked, “Before that thing is a person, what is it?”
“It’s cells in the stage of development,” Cuomo said. “Go Google it.”
Alexandra DeSantis, a writer for the conservative National Review, was among those taking issue with Quinn’s brazen claim.
“Basic biology tells us that every pregnant woman is pregnant not with a horse or an acorn or a tumor but with another human being. Inside each pregnant woman is a human being that meets all the scientific criteria to be considered alive. Each embryo or fetus has human DNA, entirely distinct from that of both its mother and its father and, indeed, from every other human being that has ever existed or will ever exist for all of human history,” she wrote.
The Party of Science™ pic.twitter.com/Ch1IqSGFdO
— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) May 7, 2019
“Each of those developing human beings is inside its mother, yes, but not part of its mother. From the moment of conception, that unborn human being has all of the cells that will develop into fully functioning organs, into its own unique fingerprints, into its own heartbeat and neural tissue. Birth does not magically confer humanity on that being. It was a human being from the start,” she added.
Matt Wolking, who is working on President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, was also among the critics of Quinn’s claim.
“The Party of Science,” he wrote in a tweet, referring to how Democrats claim to always agree with science.
Cuomo later took to Twitter to slam the pro-life movement, writing, “The pro-life position is more about faith and feeling than fact.”
