At Thursday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton called out the moderators of all nine debates for never asking a single question about abortion or reproductive rights.
Watch: Hillary Clinton slams moderators for failing to ask a single abortion question
Clinton made the remarks after an exchange about Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.
“I want to say something about this, since we’re talking about the Supreme Court and what’s at stake,” Clinton said. “We’ve had eight debates before. This is our ninth. We’ve not had one question about a woman’s right to make her own decisions about reproductive health care. Not one question.”
The hall erupted in applause and cheers, which kept going through the rest of Clinton’s response:
“And in the meantime we have states, governors, doing everything they can to restrict women’s rights. We have a presidential candidate by the name of Donald Trump saying that women should be punished, and we are never asked about this.”
Then Clinton went after Sanders, as she has before, for having called Trump’s remarks a “distraction.”
“I don’t think it’s a distraction,” she said. “It goes to the heart of who we are as women, our rights, our autonomy, our ability to make our own decisions, and we need to be talking about that and defending Planned Parenthood from these outrageous attacks.”
Sanders responded by touting his “100 percent pro-choice voting record” and said he will “take on Republican governors who are trying to restrict a woman’s right to choose,” as well as those who are “discriminating outrageously against the LGBT community.” He added that we should expand funding for Planned Parenthood, not just avoid defunding it.
The lack of questions on reproductive rights has been an enduring frustration for advocates, who in February petitioned the first all-woman debate moderator team at PBS to ask about abortion.
It’s not enough that both candidates identify as pro-choice, advocates say. There are very specific problems with reproductive rights right now that need very specific responses — what to do about the dramatic escalation in violence against abortion providers in 2015 that culminated in the Colorado Springs shooting, whether we should repeal bans on federal funding of abortion care, whether the federal government should respond to an avalanche of state abortion restrictions, some of which are now subject to the biggest Supreme Court abortion case in decades.
A Vox poll found that most Americans have no idea how severely abortion is being restricted at the state level.
And even two strongly pro-choice candidates might not approach these issues in the same way. When Clinton and Sanders were asked about later abortion restrictions at a Fox town hall, for instance, their answers weren’t the same.
