Pity the Pro-abortionist -- Part One of Two

Editor's note. Please send your thoughts to me at daveandrusko@hotmail.com

"To this generation, the 'choice' of a legal abortion is no longer something to celebrate. It is a decision made in crisis, and it is never one made happily. Have you ever talked to a woman who has had an abortion? Even a married, intentionally pregnant woman who has had a 'D and C' for a dying or dead embryo? A college student whose birth control failed? I promise you, such a woman does not talk about exercising the 'right to choose.' You may accuse her -- and me -- of taking such rights for granted, and maybe you'd be right. But mainly she will tell you how sad she is, how she wished she hadn't had to make that 'choice,' how unpleasant the procedure was. She is more likely depressed than defiant."
          From "Choice Language: Abortion is a right that ends in sorrow. Democratic
          rhetoric in the future must acknowledge this fact." Written by Sarah Blustain,
          it appeared on the web page of the American Prospect, November 21, 2004.

Parts One and Two today address what I believe are two interrelated developments, the importance of which cannot be overstated. Part two discusses what we talked initially about yesterday--a stunning 8% decline in the number of abortions between 2000 and 2005.

Part One takes a look at another piece of evidence that more and more self-proclaimed "pro-choicers" are intellectually at war with themselves over the self-evident truth that abortion's circle of victims extends beyond the brutally dismembered child. And it takes the form of nothing less than hysteria over the prospect that men who are grieving over their involvement in an abortion be allowed to share their hurt.

Before I forget let me direct you to "Pity the Man," written by Sarah Blustain for the Nation magazine www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/blustain]. Blustain is a senior editor at the New Republic.

Blustain, like an increasingly number of pro-abortionists, appears to share a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. Once they monopolized the discussion by making the dialogue over abortion a monologue: the only voice that could be heard was the woman's.

Or, to be more exact, only a particular inflection could be heard: those women who insisted that abortion was a decision strictly between herself and "her god." (Occasionally, for purposes of symmetry, they'd add "her physician.")

But as time went along even the crowd that makes a living lopping arms and heads off of defenseless children had to make a slight nod to reality. A handful of women might have a couple of post-abortion problems, they acknowledged, but that really was just a reflection of the baggage they brought to the "procedure."

Later, pro-abortionists grudgingly conceded, okay, maybe there are a few more who really are upset. But we'll take care of them ourselves lest those demonic "anti-choicers"  monopolize post-abortion caring and healing.

If you read the 2004 version of Blustain, you saw a woman who not only appeared to be ruthlessly honest with herself about abortion's complexity, but also demanded that the Democratic Party (whose "defense of abortion makes me cringe") throw overboard "the tone of the liberal message on abortion" which, for as long as she could remember, "has been defiant, sometimes even celebratory."

But while Blustain 2008 allows as how it's permitted (as noted above) to say that "the 'choice' of a legal abortion is no longer something to celebrate," by no means does that mean that men are to be allowed a voice. While she concedes in her Nation piece that "Whatever the cause of their suffering, it is real and they deserve support," she has already taken pains to dismissed its significance in the first half of the same sentence: "And pity these men who, wittingly or not, are allowing their pain to be co-opted for political gain."

Get it? It's just the "anti-choice crowd" showing its "softer" side. Why? Surely not because we really give a twit about the pain of all of abortion's secondary victims, Blustain reassures her audience. It's all politics, grounded in bogus research and anecdotal evidence, and strikingly "close to familiar conservative culture-war narratives."

But what if there really is something to this--if abortion's murderous web does snare not only the unborn but also her mother, father, and extended family--what then? We might have to think long and hard.

Reflex responses--a 'woman's choice"; a "blob of tissue"; abortion is a "settled issue"--would no longer carry the day, indeed would be instantly dismissed, in favor of a dialogue in which all voices to this American tragedy are heard.

I now turn to Part Two (and I hope you will as well) where I talk about some of the media responses to the great news that the number of abortions as shrunk by 8%. One of the reasons that won't get talked about at all is the subtle impact of a growing awareness across the board that abortion is a decision we can ALL live without.

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Part Two