Real Time host Bill Maher mocked woke advocates for transgender issues on Friday night, saying the possible overturn of Roe V. Wade was a more important issue that puts their complaints into perspective.
In his opening monologue, Maher discussed the Supreme Court leak that revealed five justices are prepared to alter the landmark abortion case.
But the talk show host couldn’t resist taking a jab at transgender people and their supporters obsession with policing pronouns.
‘Louisiana wants to pass a law that says flat out if you get an abortion, you get charged with murder. Wow,’ Maher said, referencing the state’s controversial abortion bill.
‘Suddenly getting the right pronoun doesn’t seem so big, does it?’
Along with the Louisiana bill, Maher criticized the wave of states looking to set more restrictive abortion laws as they expected Roe V. Wade to be overturned.
‘Oklahoma already has one on the books. Six weeks, can’t get an [abortion] after six weeks,’ he said. ‘Most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks.
‘They don’t even know if they like the guy. Six weeks. That’s a quick look.
Despite what he said, Maher slammed pro-choice protestors later in the show, saying their claim that ending Roe V. Wade would send U.S. abortion rights back 50 years is ‘factually inaccurate.’
Maher said the ruling is not ‘settled law’ and that it would not have the drastic impact pro-choice defenders believe it would.
‘Most abortions now, even when you go to a clinic, are done with the pill,’ Maher said. The pill. And pills are easy to get in America.’
‘So, you know, for the people who say we’re going back to 1973, we’re not. That’s just factually inaccurate.’
He added said that abortion rights in most European countries are far more restrictive than in the U.S.
‘The modern countries of Europe are way more restrictive than we are or what they’re even proposing,’ Maher said. ‘If you are pro-choice, you would like it a lot less in Germany, and Italy, and France, and Spain, and Switzerland.’
Germany, France and Spain all set an abortion limits at 14 weeks into the pregancy, with Italy and Switzerland setting the cap at 12 weeks.
Even the more liberal Norway and Denmark set the limit at 12 weeks, with Sweden limiting abortions at 18 weeks.
In the U.S., only 22 states set abortion limits at 20 weeks or less, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and most states that have set a shorter time frame cannot enforce the law as they have faced numerous legal challenges.
Maher also claimed that whatever the Supreme Court decides on would always be fluid as the law could be changed again in the future.
‘This whole bulls*** argument about, ‘Well, it’s settled law.’ So was segregation,’ Maher said. ‘Plessy vs. Ferguson was ‘settled law’ in 1896 and thank God somebody said let’s unsettle it.
‘So that’s a bulls*** argument. It’s what you think,’ Maher said. ‘If you like babies, then you’re pro-life and if you’re pro-women, you’re pro-choice.’
But Maher’s guest, Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Paul Begala insisted that the Supreme Court’s decision would compound with the wave of abortion restriction bills being passed and proposed across the U.S.
‘We’re not going back to 1973, we’re going back to 1931,’ he warned, citing Texas’s controversial six-week abortion ban that imprisons doctors who perform abortions.