What the Hell Happened to Ann Coulter?
A former pro-life warrior seems to have lost her mind—or her soul.
In 2006, Ann Coulter wrote Godless: The Church of Liberalism, which contains a powerful chapter identifying abortion as the Left’s “holiest sacrament.” It identifies the GOP’s pro-life stance as a fundamental principle:
The Republican Party was founded expressly as the antislavery party, which to a great extent remains their position today. Having won that one, with 600,000 white men having to die to redeem the principle that all men are created equal, today’s Republican Party stands for life, limited government, and national defense. And today’s Democrat Party stands for . . . the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don’t especially like. We’re the Blacks-Aren’t-Property/Don’t-Kill-Babies Party. They’re the Hookup Party.
It also nails the Left’s dishonest defenses of the practice:
The Democrats’ only hope is to lie and pretend they stand for something other than the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don’t like. For example: the right of women not to commit suicide. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for John Roberts, Senator Feinstein said, “As a college student at Stanford, I watched the passing of the plate to collect money so a young woman could go to Tijuana for a back-alley abortion. I knew a young woman who killed herself because she was pregnant.” I know a man who killed himself because of high taxes.
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Liberals can’t win on abortion in a frank discussion, so they come up with a series of feints, euphemisms, and stalking horses to promote their most sacred belief.
One such feint was recently attempted in Texas, where the deceptively-named Center for Reproductive Rights sued on behalf of a woman seeking to abort her 21-week-old child with the chromosomal defect Trisomy 18, a condition which is grave (more on it later), but not the bone of contention in this case; instead, they claim, mother Kate Cox needs abortion to evade the risks that accompany the cesarean section her delivery would require.
Essentially, according to Texas Right to Life, CRR is trying to get Texas’s straightforward medical exception language replaced by abortionists’ personal judgment of what constitutes “medically necessary,” which would obviously render any abortion ban meaningless. The Texas Supreme Court so far isn’t buying it, and Cox has reportedly gone out of state to dispose of her child (which she of course could have done at any time).
CRR and the corporate press’s spin on this case is a textbook example of the type of sophistry Coulter was writing about in 2006. Oddly enough, however, the woman who wrote the passages at the top of this column is now parroting that sophistry.
In a December 12 tweet highlighting the case, Coulter wrote:
The prolife movement has gone from compassion for the child to cruelty to the mother (and child).
Trisomy 18 is not a condition that is compatible with life.
The pro-life movement is cruel to mothers? Who are you, and what have you done with the hard-right, never-intimidated-by-liberal-narratives pro-life warrior we knew from the 1990s and 2000s? The woman who relished finding new ways to get leftists to call her “cruel”?
First, the “incompatible with life” bit is just wrong. The National Library of Medicine says “Five to 10 percent of children with this condition live past their first year,” which is obviously very low, but also means several hundred a year live for a substantial period of time (not without severe challenges, of course, but the woman who rightly described embryo-destructive stem cell research as “Nazi”-like in the aforementioned book should know better than to take quality of life as a license to kill). The emotional anguish of a likely (but not certain) stillbirth deserves sensitivity, but is not a sufficient basis to deprive another person of a chance at life, however low. Coulter has the compassion calculus exactly backwards here.
Second, my former Live Action colleague Cassy Fiano-Chesser explains that the assumption that Trisomy 18 is “incompatible with life” often turns the label into a self-fulfilling prophecy:
Because of that diagnosis, doctors are often unwilling to provide the medical care that children with Trisomy 18 need, therefore leading to an early death, and perpetuating the “incompatible with life” cycle [...]
Doctors at Children’s Hospital and Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska, are proving that. “If a family didn’t want surgery for an infant with VSD or tetralogy or even pulmonary atresia, we would take them to court, take the child out of the family and take care of them,” Dr. James Hammel, division chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Children’s, has previously said, though this is considered the standard of practice for children with Trisomy 18 – despite high success rates. According to Dr. Hammel, 70 to 80% of babies with Trisomy 18 survive heart surgery, and 50% will still be alive 16 years later. Other research has found even higher success rates.
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Hammel further told the Omaha World-Herald that the “incompatible with life” label given to children with Trisomy 18 now was previously given to children with Down syndrome; in just a few decades, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has more than doubled, thanks to medical advancements and the willingness of the medical industry to actually treat them. “What’s changed is the understanding (that) if you treat the issues they typically have, they can live a long time. They can learn and grow and participate in life,” he said.
Cassy’s excellent article also goes into more detail about CRR’s claim that Cox “needs” the abortion for her own health, which doesn’t hold water. It’s the kind of research and logical dissection that Ann’s books used to be so well known for.
Later Tuesday evening, without substantively addressing any of the scores of people who corrected her on the facts or the principles of the Cox case (except to comment on one personal anecdote while completely missing the point), Coulter followed up:
Prolifers used to be so good at picking popular issues to nudge people to our side - parental notification, spousal notification, baby born alive act, partial birth abortion ...
The Texas woman is NOT THAT CASE.
Pro-lifers didn’t pick this issue, Ann! Do you even read the stories you opine on anymore? And you’re a lawyer who also wrote one of the definitive books on liberal media bias; what happened to your skepticism when dealing with left-wing legal briefs or mainstream media treatments of their “holiest sacrament”?
This is part of a broader turn Coulter has displayed over the past year. She urged Ron DeSantis not to sign Florida’s heartbeat-based abortion ban, then hysterically sniped at him for signing it with absurd invocations of Todd Akin and Michael Dukakis (apparently not realizing that, principle aside, DeSantis’s presidential candidacy would’ve died on the spot if he had staked out an abortion stance to the left of Mike Pence, Brian Kemp, and Mike DeWine).
Ever since the 2022 Red Wave That Wasn’t, she’s been wailing that “PRO-LIFERS ARE GOING TO WIPE OUT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY” and implying the overturn of Roe v. Wade should have been the end of the issue. In April, Coulter devoted a column to blaming “pro-life nuts” for Republican losses, which she qualified with, “Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot.” (In that column, by the way, she noted, “in the entire country, only one incumbent governor lost in 2022 — pro-life, pro-choice, it didn’t matter,” apparently oblivious to how that tiny detail undercut her premise.)
But by November, the self-professed “anti-abortion zealot” was declaring that the “pro-choice mottos that enraged me when abortion was a ‘constitutional right’ make perfect sense to me now”—specifically “if you oppose abortion, don’t have one”—and approvingly quoting authors who summarize the pro-life hill (you know, the hill she connected to America’s founding principles in 2006) as “You know what America needs? More unwanted welfare ghetto babies from semi-retarded parents!”
As discussed in previous columns, the pro-life cause is not to blame for Republicans’ recent electoral woes, but recent trends do indicate a regression of public opinion that will take smarter messaging and new strategies to overcome. It’s true that part of that means solid pro-life candidates keeping campaigns focused on issues other than abortion and incremental policies tailored to the receptiveness of particular jurisdictions.
But you know what’s not going to help get pro-lifers on board with any of that? Out-of-control rants scapegoating them for election debacles they weren’t responsible for (which ironically aligns Coulter with the ex-president she now despises), forgetting that this is an issue of fundamental principles that we don’t have a choice to abandon, and spitefully declaring that maybe the babykillers were right about some things after all.
It's anyone’s guess what’s really behind this transformation—a tendency to contrarianism, attention grabbing through shock value, inability to let go of an initial misdiagnosis of a problem, reflexive doubling down to the point of absurdity, obsession with tearing down something people care about as much as or more than immigration control (plus one or two more personal theories people have floated on social media that I won’t repeat here).
Whatever the truth, the results make one wish 2006 Ann Coulter could be plucked out of 2023 to remind her present doppelganger what she used to fight for.