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At this point in the Trump era, it feels redundant—almost quaint—to point out that Republican “family values” are a farce. Still, some hypocrisies demand attention, if only to remind us how far the so-called “pro-life” movement has fallen from its sanctimonious pedestal. The latest? While Republicans sermonize about “saving babies,” their own federal agents are spraying chemicals that cause miscarriages in American neighborhoods.
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ICE’s recent violence involving children can perhaps best be typified by the unfolding story in Minneapolis of the Jackson family. On the evening of January 14, Shawn and Destiny Jackson were driving home from basketball practice with their six children in the car, when they encountered ICE. Despite their best attempts to stay calm, the family soon found themselves bombarded with tear gas; grenades detonated around the vehicle, causing the airbags to deploy. The encounter resulted in three of their children being hospitalized, including their 6-month-old baby boy, who stopped breathing at the scene, and nearly died. The mother described her new born as “lifeless, foam around his mouth” after ICE gassed the family.
The Heritage Foundation - the conservative architects behind Project 2025 - recently published a report aimed at encouraging higher birth rates. If Republicans are genuinely concerned about “saving the family,” they need to wake up to the fact that ICE is indiscriminately firing chemical agents at everyday Americans, with zero regard for the havoc they can wreak on women’s reproductive health.
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And while right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation are busy championing “higher birth rates” and “family revival” in glossy policy papers, they’re silent—utterly, deafeningly silent—about ICE using weapons linked to miscarriages in U.S. cities.
That’s not hyperbole; that’s science. A 2023 peer-reviewed study from the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health found that exposure to tear gas correlates with alarming rates of reproductive harm. Researchers discovered that 83% of women exposed reported at least one adverse symptom—heavy bleeding, painful cramping, delayed menstruation. Among women who were pregnant at the time, more than half suffered miscarriages—double the national average. Half. Gone.
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That study, born out of the 2020 Minneapolis protests, was serious enough to prompt the city’s police department to reform its crowd-control policies, requiring high-level authorization before deploying tear gas. Even they recognized how dangerous this stuff is. ICE, apparently, does not. With Trump back in the Oval and the federal leash unclipped, the agency has turned American streets into testing grounds for reproductive toxins.
And all of this, mind you, from the same political movement that gutted Roe v. Wade, shut down abortion clinics, and invented whole new ways to criminalize pregnant women in the name of “life.” In his first term, Trump told the National Prayer Breakfast he would “cherish the dignity and sanctity of life.” Now his enforcers are literally drenching cities in chemicals proven to harm pregnancies.
If “pro-life” were anything more than a convenient campaign slogan, Republicans would be screaming from the rooftops about the miscarriage-inducing effects of tear gas. Instead, their silence is telling—because it’s never been about life. It’s about control: over women, over families, over entire communities deemed expendable.
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Meanwhile, Minnesota mothers are locking their windows at night, hoping the next ICE raid doesn’t fill the nursery with gas. Schools are going into lockdowns not because of violence, but because the air outside burns to breathe. So much for “protecting children.”
The cruel irony is almost biblical. The party that paints itself as the guardian of unborn life is now literally poisoning it. The same movement that quotes scripture about babies in the womb has nothing to say about babies coughing through tear gas or women miscarrying after exposure.
So yes, it’s exhausting to catalog Republican hypocrisies. But silence in the face of cruelty is complicity—and there’s nothing pro-life about that.
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