Janet Porter, spokeswoman for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, began a CNN interview on Tuesday by suggesting that Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, supports killing the interviewer’s unborn baby.
“Thank you, it is great to be with you, and by the way, congratulations on your unborn child,” Porter said to host Poppy Marlow, who is pregnant. “That’s the reason I came down as a volunteer to speak for Judge Roy Moore, because he stands for the rights of babies like yours in the womb, where his opponent will support killing them until the moment of birth.”
Porter’s claim is false. Though Jones is pro-choice, he made clear during a recent interview with AL.com that he supports Alabama’s existing abortion laws, which ban most late-term abortions.
“To be clear, I fully support a woman’s freedom to choose to what happens to her own body. That is an intensely, intensely personal decision that only she, in consultation with her god, her doctor, her partner or family, that’s her choice,” Jones said. “Having said that, the law for decades has been that late-term procedures are generally restricted except in the case of medical necessity. That’s what I support. I don’t see any changes in that. It is a personal decision.”
At another point in the interview, Harlow took exception to Porter mentioning her unborn child, admonishing her to “leave my child out of this. Let’s leave my child out of this.”
Porter is an anti-abortion extremist who led an unsuccessful effort to get lawmakers in Ohio to approve a “Heartbeat Bill” that would ban abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy. Right Wing Watch notes that in 2010, Porter lost her radio program “when the Christian network that hosted it objected to her increasing embrace of an extremist Christian movement known as Dominionism, which teaches that Christians are to control all levers of power within society and use those positions to implement public policy that corresponds to the Bible.” She’s the founder of Faith2Action, an organization listed as an “active anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The pugilist defending Roy Moore on @PoppyHarlowCNN program today is someone I profiled nearly 20 years ago, then named Janet Folger, an anti-gay rights campaigner so strident she repelled even allies in the Ohio legislature. Link: https://t.co/812wFsbhmk
— Laurie Goodstein (@lauriegnyt) December 5, 2017
Porter spent most of her CNN interview attacking the credibility of the eight women who have accused Moore of sexual misconduct, including child molestation. Her case on Moore’s behalf included repeatedly bringing up that there is a group of women who haven’t accused him of misconduct.
“We need to make it clear there’s a group of nonaccusers, that have not accused the judge of anything illegal,” she said at one point.
At the end of the interview, Porter repeatedly dodged a straightforward question about if she believes any of Moore’s accusers, but said it doesn’t matter anyway because “what matters is the people in Alabama believe the judge.”
“You want to know what all of this is about? I’ll tell you what it’s about — it’s all about the Supreme Court of the United States,” Porter said. “You realize this is winner-take-all race, that the one who wins this race is the one who will decide the Supreme Court for the next 30 or 40 years.”