Ted Cruz knows all about Chrissy Teigen’s abortion because he checked the vibes

Chrissy Teigen recently spoke publicly about her medically necessary abortion at 20 weeks — which she had previously described as a miscarriage — and Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz of course had something to say about it. Because Teigen’s abortion is politically inconvenient for Republicans, Cruz has declared that it is not an abortion at all. Abortion, according to Republicans, is defined solely by those procedures they find morally objectionable.

Before the fall of Roe, abortion as an issue was an effective component of Republican politicians’ culture war messaging — a satisfyingly bloody emblem of the loose women and feminists created and emboldened by the left. But having now caught the tiger by its tail and enabled strict abortion bans in states across the country, they are struggling to reckon with the reality that abortion is nothing more sinister than a medical procedure, and often a life-saving one.

“If there’s a medical procedure in that context, it’s not an abortion,” Cruz declared on his Verdict podcast. “It is the law in all 50 states, and it should be the law in all 50 states, that doctors can intervene to save the life of the mother even if it means, tragically, losing the child.” Well, who is the one who decides in what context an abortion is a “medical procedure” or not? Is it Cruz himself? The federal government? Because for the practitioners who perform abortions and the patients who receive them, the procedure is exactly the same.

What’s more, is Cruz unaware that the attorney general of his own state, Ken Paxton, sued the federal government for requiring hospitals to perform abortions in cases of medical emergencies? Because if Texas is required to perform medically necessary abortions, who’s to decide which abortions are medically necessary or not? Paxton at least seems to realize that allowing some abortions creates a slippery slope to allowing all abortions — because scientifically, all abortions are the same. And that’s bad messaging.

During July’s congressional hearings, Erin Morrow Hawley insisted to Representative Ayanna Pressley that abortions performed to remove ectopic pregnancies are not, in fact, abortions at all. Another witness for the Republican side told Representative Swalwell that an abortion performed on a 10-year-old victim of rape would not be a real abortion either. But despite what conservatives and anti-abortion advocates might wish, abortion cannot be defined by vibes alone. Abortion is a medical procedure, regardless of the context in which it is performed.

It is unfortunately unsurprising that Cruz and the rest of his cohort did not bother to fully examine the scientific realities of abortion before speaking about it or to anticipate the impact its ban would have across the country. Medical professionals in states with severely restrictive abortion bans cannot anticipate which specific abortions will make their politicians feel personally icky or not. At the moment, in many places the law is unclear at which specific point doctors are permitted to intervene and perform an abortion — leaving pregnant women in these states vulnerable. In some cases, those women will die after failing to receive life-saving medical care. Does Cruz feel himself qualified to assess at what point Teigen’s life was sufficiently endangered to allow medical intervention?

The word “abortion” was once a useful political bogeyman for the right. But now that they’ve set the monster free and let it out into the world, they are unwilling to deal with its practical consequences. Republicans merely wanted to cast moral judgment on pregnant people and exert control over their women, and they are ready to let women die in order to maintain that privilege. They just don’t want anyone to say it like that.