Editor's note. This is NRLC Federal Legislative Director Douglas Johnson's rebuttal to a column written by Slate's Will Saletan.

I believe that Mr. Saletan's analysis reflects either a greatly distorted perception or a highly tendentious presentation of what is really going on, but for the moment I will confine myself to a few points of clarification and elaboration.

I referred to the capable Rachel Laser of Third Way as a career pro-abortion activist because that is what she is. Before joining Third Way, she was an attorney with the reproductive rights project at the National Women's Law Center. Before that she was general counsel to Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, a major abortion provider. In my opinion, nowadays she continues to pursue the same policy goals by other means, utilizing what in military terminology are termed false flag operations. By this I mean that Third Way is devoted to advancing and consolidating the public policy goals of the pro-abortion lobby, with a methodology that employs misleading rhetoric, labels, and props intended to disguise the substance of that agenda, and to provide political camouflage for the pro-abortion politicians who adopt their approach.

As one example, we see a politician (Barack Obama) who has never supported the slightest limitation on abortion, and who is pushing hard for health care legislation that would result in the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade, proceeding behind cover of a Third-Way-style smokescreen that is purely rhetorical (seeking abortion reduction, common ground, etc.).

Mr. Saletan fails to appreciate that the Ryan-DeLauro bill is little more than a prop in this political charade. Mr. Saletan is looking square at a Potemkin village, and he is most interested in discussing the details of the plumbing. Why did Third Way sponsor a common ground press conference on Capitol Hill on July 23? Ostensibly to promote the Ryan-DeLauro abortion reduction bill, but really, for the primary purpose of furthering the abortion lobby's attempts to undercut efforts by bona fide pro-life members of the House of Representatives [led by Chris Smith, Republican of New Jersey; Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan; and Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania] to amend the Obama-backed health care legislation to prevent subsidies and mandates for abortion. (Here again, Ryan is just the front man -- the power brokers are Speaker Pelosi, Congressman Henry Waxman, and the White House.) On July 21, two days before the Third Way common ground press conference, Ryan sent a public letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposing a common ground compromise on abortion in the health care legislation. I'll spare you the details of the subtext here: the bottom line is, under the Ryan-Pelosi-Waxman scheme, the huge new federal subsidies would flow to health plans that fund elective abortions. That would be a big victory for the pro-abortion side, because currently, nobody has federally subsidized abortion coverage -- not in Medicaid, not the military, not federal employees.

Under the Obama-backed legislation, with or without the phony Ryan language, we could see 70 million or more Americans with federally subsidized coverage of elective abortions.

Not to put too fine a point on it: The common ground that President Obama and Third Way seek for the pro-life movement is the burial ground.

Mr. Saletan's statement that Ryan has stood up for unborn life, vote after vote after vote after vote, regrettably does not comport with Mr. Ryan's actual voting record. Early in his congressional career, Ryan cast some pro-life votes and some pro-abortion votes. (As an example of the latter, in 2004 he voted to repeal the ban on elective abortions in U.S. military facilities.) Since 2007, however, Mr. Ryan's record has not been mixed -- he did not cast a single pro-life vote in 2007, 2008, or 2009. Ryan's most recent abortion-related vote occurred in the House Appropriations Committee on July 7, 2009, when he voted against all the real pro-lifers and in favor of repealing the longstanding ban on funding elective abortions, with funds appropriated by Congress, in the District of Columbia. Ryan advocates letting D.C. (a federal jurisdiction) pay for abortion on demand, with funds appropriated by Congress, under a paper bookkeeping scheme. The result, if enacted, will be the funding of 4,000 or 5,000 abortions annually with congressionally appropriated funds, including about 1,000 abortions a year that would not happen otherwise. In a subsequent press interview, Ryan said, This bill doesn't provide public funding for abortions, a transparent falsehood; all D.C. funds are appropriated by Congress.

Ryan got his friend, Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fl.), to sign his July 21 letter to Pelosi, another illustration of the complete phoniness of this initiative. Meek has been in the House since 2003 and he has never, ever cast a pro-life vote on any abortion-related issue -- not even on partial-birth abortion, parental notification, or fetal homicide. He's voted on the other side more than 30 times. In fact, as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Meek actually voted against the amendments to remove abortion mandates and abortion subsidies from the Obama-backed health care bill, on July 16-17.

Obviously, Ryan and Meek are confident that many journalists will accept their self-chosen characterizations on any given day of the week, without really checking their records or their credentials. It appears that this confidence is often well founded. In fact, the entire Third Way false flag strategy relies heavily on this sort of willing gullibility that many journalists are willing to adopt on certain issues.

It should be noted that the organization called Democrats for Life of America, not generally described as a militant group, kicked Ryan off their advisory board last year -- and no, it wasn't because he supports contraception.

Anyone interested in seeing Mr. Ryan's complete record on NRLC-scored House floor votes can go to http://nrlc.www.capwiz.com/bio/id/30639&lvl=C&chamber=H.  Click on the Votes tab, then click on More Key Votes.

The same sort of display can easily be obtained for Meek or for any other incumbent member of Congress, simply by entering the lawmaker's last name into the search tool.

By the way, there is an omnibus abortion reduction bill that has been languishing in the Democratic-controlled Congress for months, the Pregnant Women Support Act (H.R. 2035, S. 1032), sponsored by Congressman Lincoln Davis (D-Tn.) and 39 others, and by Senators Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Ben Nelson (D-Ne.). That bill does not contain any restrictions on abortion, but there are sections that recognize that there exists such an entity as an unborn child, which makes the bill unacceptable to pro-abortion advocacy groups.

Part One