I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Mark Robinson’s abortion ad. It feels as though I’ve seen it a thousand times lately while watching TV. It’s maybe the most disingenuous and ineffective political ad of the cycle and speaks volumes about how the GOP is trying to hide its true views from the public.
Robinson is sitting next to his wife, Yolanda Hill, earnestly looking into the camera.
“Thirty years ago, my wife and I made a very difficult decision,” Robinson says in a gentle voice while soothingly grabbing his wife’s hand. “We had an abortion.”
“It was like this silent pain between us that we never spoke of,” Robinson continues while fighting tears.
After his wife speaks about her regret, the ad cuts to Robinson reading to a cute little girl with pigtails sitting on his lap. He then claims he’s in favor of North Carolina’s current abortion law because it includes “common sense exceptions for the life of the mother, incest and rape and stops cruel late-term abortions.”
But laws like North Carolina’s have led to women across the country being denied care, including one pregnant N.C. woman who complained of stomach pain being denied care at a Roxboro hospital emergency room. On her way to a hospital 45 minutes away, she gave birth in a car. The baby died. Such “common sense exceptions” are often no match for the fear anti-abortion laws inflict upon medical professionals in real time.
If you knew nothing of Robinson, you’d probably think either the ad is uncomfortably invasive — we shouldn’t know so much about a choice Yolanda Hill made with her own body — or that Mark Robinson is the most empathetic, most caring man on the planet.
The real Robinson, the one not propped up in front of a TV camera in a well-lit political ad guided by campaign strategists, is neither empathetic, nor kind. He’s cruel and crass. Just five years ago, the real Mark Robinson said this about abortion:
“Everybody knows that abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers,” Robinson screamed on Facebook. “It is about convenience. It is about abortion on demand. That is exactly what it’s about. It’s about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down or your pants up — and not get pregnant by your own choice, because you felt like getting your groove thing on. And now instead of taking care of that child, you want to kill that child so your life can go on, being on easy street and you can keep running to the club every Friday night.”
Robinson said those words in 2019, knowing that he and his wife had “made a very difficult decision” two and a half decades earlier — and while he was calling for laws that would effectively ban abortion.
The new ad makes him look like a hypocrite trying to hide his hypocrisy and undercuts what has been his primary calling card since a 2018 rant he delivered about gun rights made him a star on the right.
Robinson was supposedly a straight-shooter. He was supposedly willing to speak truth no matter the circumstances. He was supposedly a man who would never back down from a fight.
That ad is more evidence that those things have never been true. It doesn’t make him look relatable and contrite, but rather small and politically calculating, the last thing someone like Robinson is supposed to be.
I get that Robinson is following the playbook of other Republicans, including his hero Donald Trump. The GOP has decided to hide its true thoughts and intentions about abortion until after the election because they know those thoughts and intentions are political losers. Most Americans think it’s wrong to effectively turn over control of a pregnant woman’s body to the state. It’s why Trump urged the party to water down “pro-life” language in the Republican National Convention’s platform.
No one should be fooled about what Robinson might do as governor. Despite his sudden support of North Carolina’s abortion law, voters don’t know if they’ll get that Mark Robinson or the one who said earlier this year that “We’ve got it down to 12 weeks. The next goal is to get it down to six, and then just keep moving from there.”
Another reason the state should not be turned over to a man like him.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.
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