Dr. Oz: Abortion is murder from the time of conception, except for when it's not
Mehmet Oz, the television snake oil huckster and Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, has had what you might call a devolution in his thinking on abortion. He’s gone from approaching the issue as a medical practitioner to a typical Republican, telling his audience whatever he thinks they want to hear. In the case of a tele-town hall audience earlier this year, it’s the most extreme message: life begins at conception.
The Daily Beast obtained audio of a campaign event in May, a week before the Republican primary, in which he told voters he believed that abortion is “still murder” from the moment the sperm enters the egg. “I do believe life starts at conception, and I’ve said that multiple times,” he told the audience. “If life starts at conception,” Oz added, “why do you care what age the heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder, if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.”
That question came up from an attendee about Oz’s previous life as a TV doctor in 2019, when he opined about the arbitrary six-week bans in a Breakfast Club interview. “If you’re going to define life by a beating heart,” he said in 2019, “then make it a beating heart, not little electrical exchanges in the cell that no one would hear or think about as a heart.” Oz also said that he was “really worried” about the harmful health effects if federal abortion protections were overturned by the Supreme Court.