House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was not interested in entertaining questions Thursday from a reporter from conservative news outlet CNSNews.com who pressed the California Democrat on her views on abortion.
The brief exchange came as Pelosi answered questions about a long-term budget and spending bill at her weekly news conference. The reporter sat in the first row of the presser and spoke up over several other reporters vying to ask a question of the Democratic leader.
Q: “Is an unborn baby with a human heart and a human liver a human being?”
Pelosi: “Why don’t you take your ideological questions…I don’t…”
Q: “If it’s not a human being, what species is it?”
Pelosi: “Listen, I’m going to say something to you. I don’t know who you are and you are welcome to be here in freedom of this press. I am a devout, practicing Catholic. I’m a mother of five children. When my baby was born, my fifth child, my oldest was six. I think I know more about this subject than you, with all due respect.
I do not intend to respond to your questions which have no basis in what public policy is that we do here.”
Pelosi quickly moved on to a question about Russia.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) received a similar question in September and also declined to respond directly.
But the question comes as Congress on Wednesday defeated efforts to strip Planned Parenthood of funding as part of the just-passed government spending measure. Conservatives demanded that the women’s health organization lose its federal funding after videos surfaced in which they said the group was illegally trying to sell fetal issue. But Democrats and President Obama disagreed, and the government spending measure passed without such language.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the questioner as a protester. The question came from a reporter from CNSNews.com, a conservative news site.
