By Alan Rappeport
Hillary Clinton
campaigned Saturday at the Wisconsin Democratic Founders Day Gala in Milwaukee. Credit:
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Hillary Clinton
faced criticism from both sides of the abortion debate on Monday after she
waded into the fraught argument about when life begins by describing the unborn
as a “person.”
Mrs. Clinton,
the leading Democratic presidential candidate, made the comment during an
interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after she was asked about abortion
restrictions and the rights of the unborn.
“The unborn
person doesn’t have constitutional rights,” Mrs. Clinton said.
She added:
“That doesn’t mean that we don’t do everything we possibly can, in the vast
majority of instances to, you know, help a mother who is carrying a child and
wants to make sure that child will be healthy, to have appropriate medical
support.”
Presidential
candidates have been struggling to discuss the sensitive topic of abortion, and
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks came less than a week after Donald J. Trump, the leading
Republican candidate, came under fire for saying that abortion should be banned
and that women who have abortions should be punished. He later backtracked,
saying that doctors who perform abortions should be punished. Then he said that
the current laws should not be changed.
A longtime
advocate of abortion rights, Mrs. Clinton is often criticized by anti-abortion
groups. In this case, however, she frustrated some abortion rights supporters
who said that her characterization of the unborn as a person shamed women who
choose to terminate a pregnancy.
“Hillary
Clinton further stigmatizes abortion,” Diana Arellano, community engagement manager
for Planned Parenthood of Illinois, wrote on Twitter. “She calls a fetus an ‘unborn
child’ and calls for later term restrictions.”
Abortion
opponents also seized on the remark as evidence of Mrs. Clinton’s hypocrisy,
arguing that if a fetus can be considered a person then it should have
constitutional protections.
Rebecca
Kiessling, the spokeswoman for the Personhood Alliance, which opposes abortion,
said that defining fetuses as persons should mean that they are entitled to a
right to life under the 14th Amendment. She considered Mrs. Clinton’s comment
to be a “big gaffe” from the abortion rights perspective.
“It’s
interesting that Hillary has now recognized the unborn as person and that she
wants to deny them equal protection,” Ms. Kiessling said. “You can’t have it
both ways.”
Mrs. Clinton’s
use of the word “person” was also seen as a rhetorical victory by those
who oppose abortion and a sign that the debate was shifting in their
favor.
“I was actually
pretty surprised, because usually when you hear her talk it’s about the fetus,”
said Tina Whittington, executive vice president of Students for Life. “To
acknowledge it’s a human person, a human child, to us it’s huge.”
The Clinton
campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
