WASHINGTON — Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) said in a newly unearthed interview from 2022 that women who have abortions “hate the country” and “hate that baby” because they know if they carried their pregnancies to term, it would mean responsibility.
Schweikert, who is currently facing a tough reelection bid, made his comments in July 2022 on a conservative radio program, “The Seth Leibsohn Show.” During the interview, host Seth Leibsohn referenced a woman in a House oversight committee hearing who had recently testified that having an abortion was the best decision she’d made and “an act of self-love.”
“Think about what she just said,” Schweikert said. “You have a number of these [inaudible] that life means nothing, self means everything.”
Leibsohn agreed as Schweikert went on.
“It’s about self. It’s about self. It’s about self,” said the Arizona congressman. “And you wonder why they hate the country because they only care about themselves.”
He continued, “They hate their neighbors because they only care about themselves. They hate that baby because it symbolizes a responsibility.”
Schweikert, who adopted a baby son in 2022, brought up what it was like holding his infant. He suggested Democrats would have let his son die.
“I’m not being melodramatic, but I’m holding this little underweight baby that we’re worried about and realizing just a couple days earlier, when this child was in the womb, half this body, the majority of these Democrats, all of these Democrats would have been willing to have that baby die as long it was — had not passed through the birth canal,” he said.
“It’s harsh and it’s mean, but it’s true,” Schweikert added. “You need to embrace how sick society is and how sick the Democratic Party has become.”
Schweikert’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But weirdly, Leibsohn responded from his own email address and offered his perspective.
“It was clear to me then, as it is now (David and I speak often), and from the very context of my question and his answer, that ‘they’ or ‘a number of these folks’ (was about leftist radicals) for whom ‘life means nothing, and self means everything…they hate the country because they only care about themselves,’ and so on,” Leibsohn wrote in his email.
“‘A number of these folks,’ as David put it, is, after all, not a universal characterization,” said the conservative radio host.
Leibsohn did not respond when asked how or why he was contacting HuffPost instead of Schweikert, and did not say if Schweikert asked him to respond on his behalf.
You can listen to the “Seth Leibsohn Show” exchange here:
In another interview on Leibsohn’s show, in November 2022, Schweikert suggested that some people in “wealthy, white, well-educated” areas voted Democratic in the recent midterm elections because “President [Donald] Trump hurt their feelings.” He also claimed that women who don’t have children and aren’t married just vote for candidates based on what’s “trendy.”
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“There is sort of ‘I have a family now, I need to defend my family’ [and] ‘I don’t have a family, I’m going to defend more my, whatever feels trendy at this moment,’” said the Arizona Republican.
Schweikert’s criticisms of women who don’t have children echo the sentiments of Trump’s 2024 vice presidential running mate, Republican JD Vance, who has offended women with past comments attacking “childless cat ladies” as “miserable” and claiming they “don’t have a direct stake” in America.
Schweikert is running for reelection in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, which was newly redrawn in 2022. This region is increasingly becoming more Democratic, and the GOP congressman has been toning down his party’s rhetoric as of late, particularly on issues like abortion. Democrat Joe Biden won this district in the 2020 presidential election by 1.5%.
This seat is rated a “Toss Up” by the Cook Political Report. Schweikert is effectively tied with his challenger, Democrat Amish Shah, an emergency room physician.