Late-night hosts weren’t shy about expressing their anger over Alabama’s newly signed (by Republican Governor Kay Ivey), draconian anti-abortion law, a blanket ban on a medical procedure affecting only one gender which completely removes women’s autonomy over their own bodies. And while Seth Meyers made room for some of his women writers (led by the adorable even when righteously pissed Amber Ruffin), it seems like men in general have had enough of a say on the issue. Especially since the Alabama, Ohio, and other Republican-led efforts to take women’s rights away have proven with crystal-fucking-clarity that these (overwhelmingly white, male) legislators don’t have a single, fucking clue what the hell they’re talking about when it comes to abortion, contraception, or that scary, mysterious area called a woman’s reproductive system.
Luckily Samantha Bee is on the case, as the first segment of her Wednesday Full Frontal took the form of a sardonically comprehensive look at just how clueless (or bad-faith, mock ignorant) these politicians are in their march toward the Gilead. In her Sex Ed For Senators, Bee patiently pointed out some facts of basic human biology these men might have known had their parents not led the charge to ban all sex education from public schools a few decades ago. Facts like women don’t magically know they’re pregnant the moment it happens, a seemingly standard piece of information any rational human would have, apart from one Eric Johnston, an Alabama lawyer and unelected anti-choice activist who helped draft that state’s new law.
Or the supposed embryo-911 medical procedure that doesn’t exist championed by one Rep. John Becker (R-OH), whereby an ectopic pregnancy is implanted into a woman’s womb. As Bee put it about Becker (the “old, tragic Kenneth from 30 Rock”), the basic fact that no such procedure exists and would be incredibly stupid to do if it did is the sort of “ignorance [that] is going to kill people.” (Becker also doesn’t know how contraceptives work, proving that the GOP is really in the hands of D-students.) Then there’s the provision in the Georgia law (yet to go into effect, women of Georgia—get the real facts from Planned Parenthood) whereby women who’ve had miscarriages can be investigated? For, presumably, murder? As Bee put it to “smug chodes” who told women they were being all hysterical when they rang the Handmaid’s Tale alarm bells, it’s time to take a seat and let women who know what the hell they’re talking about take the lead.
And while these anti-abortion dunces are overwhelmingly of the remedial Republican class, Bee wasn’t demure about calling out (white, male) Democrats who’ve completely whiffed on some key facts about abortion. Playing a clip of “Uncle Mothballs” Bernie Sanders lending credence to the Fox News bad-faith talking point about babies being aborted “up to the moment of birth” during his appearance at one of Fox’s pitchfork party “town halls,” Bee explained that that’s not a thing, and that capitulating to right-wing scare tactics just gives dipshits like Donald Trump the green light to take that dropped ball and run with it “all the way to hell.” (Cue video of Trump whipping a willfully gullible crowd into booing a horror movie scenario whereby a doctor swaddles a newborn baby, then decides with the new mother how to murder it.) She also called out Democratic (white, male) hopeful Beto O’Rourke for the same dumb mistake, concluding her desperately needed sex ed lesson with the warning that these extreme, Republican-passed laws are meant to “oppress and control and ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade.” Calling it “especially fucked up” that the people doing the regulating “wouldn’t know a vulva if it bit them in the face,” Bee sent her students out to get biting. Class dismissed.