It always ranks high on voters’ minds as an issue that’s important to them. But after a recent ruling on the issue from the Arizona state supreme court, Fox News doesn’t seem to want to spend any time talking about it.
Abortion.
Arizona’s court ruled Tuesday that officials may enforce an 1864 law criminalizing all abortions except when a woman’s life is at stake.
It was a topic of news and conversation on CNN for 2 hours of airtime and MSNBC gave it 2 hours 20 minutes of airtime. Fox? Twelve minutes and none in the evening, per an analysis from Media Matters, the left-leaning journalism watchdog group.
“You can tell Fox News thinks the Arizona court ruling banning abortion is bad for Trump because they’re not talking about it. They did the same thing after the Alabama IVF ruling,” Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, posted to X, formerly Twitter.
The court said enforcement won’t begin for at least two weeks and it doesn’t provide exceptions for rape or incest.
Under a near-total ban, the number of abortions in the state is expected to drop from about 1,100 monthly — as estimated by a survey for the Society of Family Planning — to almost zero. The forecast is based on what has happened in other states that ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
And there’s some evidence Gertz is right about Donald Trump.
The former president said Wednesday afternoon he thought the judges went too far.
“Yeah, they did,” he told reporters. “That’ll be straightened out. As you know it’s all about state’s rights. It’ll be straightened out. I’m sure that the governor and everybody else are going bring it back to within reason.”
According to AP VoteCast, 6 out of 10 Arizona voters in the 2022 midterm elections said they would favor guaranteeing access to legal abortion nationwide.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.
