Let me tell you a tragic story about a woman who lost her baby due to a miscarriage. It’s every mother’s worst nightmare, the thought of losing her precious baby before it’s even born. Making it so much worse, the grieving mother was set upon by vicious right wing police who arrested her on manslaughter charges. The final insult was a prison sentence.
Thank God for the kind heart of one lawyer who offered to help this woman for free. Her conviction was overturned, and she was released to go back to mothering her living children.
At least – this is the kind of nightmare that Democrat voters want to prevent.
Except it didn’t happen that way. But New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, from whom I cribbed this story, thinks that it did.
So does the Washington Post.
And so does Esquire Magazine, which used the Washington Post story about Patience Frazier, the woman in question.
If those were the only articles you read, you would think that’s what happened, too. And millions of Americans will see only these headlines and conclude that, yes, evil Republicans really do want to punish women for innocent miscarriages. How could they not think this, when the most popular news aggregator serves them this?
But X (Twitter) has something different: community notes. Community notes is a feature added to X after Elon Musk bought the company. It allows X users to challenge the premises of a post and actually correct incorrect information with facts. Let’s take another look at Nicholas Kristof’s post with the community note included.
That’s a horse of a different color. Not only did this “miscarriage” occur six years ago, well before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but Miss Frazier deliberately induced a miscarriage by taking illicit drugs, among other activities. When she got the stillbirth she wanted, she buried the baby in her backyard quietly.
Reasonable people can still disagree over whether what Frazier did rises to the level of manslaughter, and over whether it’s a good idea to allow the state this much leeway to investigate circumstances like this. But facts are facts: Frazier was not “oppressed” by Republicans, or by anyone. Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with the death of her baby; Miss Frazier did it.
Let’s sample the social media reaction.
Nathaniel asks a question that clearly could never occur to a liberal.
