This morning, the Supreme Court struck down Texas' stringent abortion clinic regulations in a 5-3 ruling that found the regulations medically unnecessary and unconstitutional. It's a momentous day in the fight for abortion rights and access to reproductive health care, and many are celebrating, including The Daily Show — which tried to get in on the festivities but sorely missed the mark with this tweet:
Celebrate the #SCOTUS ruling! Go knock someone up in Texas!
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 27, 2016
Twitter users were not amused, responding swiftly with disappointment in the show's choice to make light of abortion and use language suggestive of coerced sex. "I'm all for the SCOTUS decision, but your tweet is ill-considered, at best," one user wrote; "Not funny, and I am pro-choice," another added. The show has sent another tweet insisting its intentions were pure:
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Friends, we’re certainly not promoting abortions. Just excited about #SCOTUS reaffirming right to choose.
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 27, 2016
When you're forced to defend your joke like that, maybe it's time to question whether it was worth making in the first place. It's not as if the Supreme Court's ruling has made abortion instantaneously accessible to everyone in Texas — the state's regulations led to the closure of over half of its abortion clinics, and they won't reopen overnight — and casting abortion as something easy to come by disrespects the countless women who need abortion care and don't get it. What's more, the people that The Daily Show's tweet encourages aren't those who would have to bear the burden of unintended pregnancy. That would be women.
We're calling this one a swing and a miss for The Daily Show's social media team.
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