February 21, 2023 01:23 PM UTC

Rep. "There Is No" Bottoms Compares Abortion To The Holocaust

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Denver7’s Meghan Lopez reports on the death of three Republican anti-abortion rights bills in a marathon hearing on Friday, featuring the usual crowds of religious right witnesses who generally speaking aren’t there to talk about any particular bill but to testify to an Audience of One how much they disapprove of abortion rights. The crowd was reportedly somewhat reduced from previous years, but no less vitriolic under the new direction of freshman fringe firebrand Rep. Scott “There Is No” Bottoms of Colorado Springs:

“I don’t understand a people that think that killing their own babies is a good thing. I just don’t understand that. It goes beyond my, my rational thinking,” said Rep. Scott Bottoms, R-Colorado Springs, the sponsor of the two bills.

Bottoms and Luck have no co-sponsors on the bill. Before Friday’s committee hearing, Bottoms admitted that the bills had practically no chance of passing in a Democratically controlled House. Still, he said it’s important to move the conversation forward.

“I am going to move the conversation because anytime you speak truth to that darkness, you actually push that darkness backwards,” he said.

As Colorado Newsline’s William Oster reports, ostensibly anti-abortion legislation to require the administration of anesthetics to fetus past a certain gestational limit was denounced by the hard right opponents of any abortions, who aren’t content with half measures to that end:

Various members of anti-abortion groups like Colorado Right to Life and End Abortion Now were also against the bill, using colorful metaphors to argue that, whether the fetus can feel the pain, the bill would still allow abortion to be administered, and abortion should be banned completely.

“Voting ‘yes’ on this bill is the equivalent of saying ‘yes’ to beating a child to death with a baseball bat as long as you give them pain medicine beforehand,” said Maxine Enyart, a mother of three children. “The only bill that you can pass in terms of abortion is the complete abolition of all abortions.”

In addition to so-called “fetal pain” legislation, also debated and dispatched to the circular file was the super-simple annual bill to criminalize performing abortion also carried by Rep. Bottoms, followed finally by legislation requiring doctors to “inform” patients about the medically unsound practice of “reversing” medication abortions. It was during the introduction of this final piece of legislation that Rep. Bottoms, presumably frustrated by the long day spent watching his legislation wend its way to inevitable defeat, deviated from whatever script he was using and…well, went there.

Where, you ask? Where does every American political debate in the last eighty years go to die?

BOTTOMS: Recently in the Denver Post, Dr. Daniel Grossman, OBGYN and researcher at the University of California San Francisco, he says the two medical regime is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and he and another colleague have studies that showed it to be safe. Now, who is safe in this scenario? It’s not the baby.

That’s like a similar experience that we had with, uh, the Nuremburg trials that said that the use of gas upon the Jewish people was much more humane. Humane to whom? Not the Jewish people, they died en masse by the millions. So this is safe to the mother, but it is a death knell to the baby. [Pols emphasis]

Godwin’s Law is infallible, and as readers know the corollary to Godwin’s Law is that you lose the argument right there, case closed. It baffles us that Rep. Bottoms wasn’t gaveled down after this outrageous trivialization of the Holocaust, and it’s even more bizarre that none of the news coverage of this hearing–which featured plenty of Bottoms scraping the proverbial bottom rhetorically–took note of it. “Republican state representative compares abortion to the Holocaust” should have been the headline, not sanitized out of the story completely.

Because this is what anti-abortionists believe. It’s what they tell each other when they think it’s safe.

All Rep. Scott Bottoms did was say it out loud.