During the April 14 Democratic presidential debate, hosted by CNN, Hillary Clinton called out debate moderators for failing to ask the Democratic candidates a single question about abortion, a deficiency that has occurred in all nine debates. It’s not just the increasing assault on reproductive rights across the country, or that women’s groups and social media advocates have encouraged moderators to ask about abortion that makes the omission significant; it’s that moderators of Republican debates have brought up the topic repeatedly, which has helped the extreme positions of the GOP candidates to set the parameters of the national debate through campaign coverage reporting.

In the course of 12 Republican presidential primary debates, the questions moderators have asked the GOP candidates on abortion have allowed them to attack Planned Parenthood and advocate that the health care organization be defunded, argue that abortion should be further criminalized, question whether abortion should even be legal in cases of rape and incest, and boast about putting unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics.

These positions are out of line with those of most Americans and rely on conservative misinformation. Republican candidates have used deceptively edited videos released by the anti-choice group Center For Medical Progress (CMP) to call for Planned Parenthood to be investigated by the Justice Department, even though a growing list of state and federal inquiries have cleared the women’s health organization of any wrongdoing.

The complete absence of questions about abortion in Democratic debates has, as Daniel Marans wrote for the Huffington Post, “given Republicans an opening to set the terms of the discussion” about reproductive rights. Mattie Kahn pointed out in Elle that “If we're willing to give the GOP a mic to debate who is going to defund Planned Parenthood the hardest, we owe it to Democrats to give these candidates a chance to discuss who is best prepared to defend it.” And Rewire editor-in-chief Jodi Jacobson argued that the media, by not asking questions about abortion, is “complicit” in “perpetuating both abortion stigma and the mirage of consequence-free abortion restrictions."

Debate moderators failed even to ask Democratic candidates about Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, which was argued before the Supreme Court in March and was dubbed the "highest-stakes abortion case in a generation." As NARAL Pro-Choice America has written, given the fact that women confront “near daily threats to their right to reproductive freedom in this country,” the failure of debate moderators to ask about abortion is “shameful and a real disservice to voters.”