If, like me, you love movies, you might have seen variations of the same scene I have umpteen times: a tiny little crack appears in the ground and a moment later the insignificant fissure has become a major chasm.

Typically, the hero straddles the unexpected divide before leaping to safety just in the nick of time. The villains straddle the same divide and in their cowardice or greed dither and fall into the watery chasm.

As a single-issue organization our purview is limited. But I do read (or at least skim) other areas both for pleasure and because it frequently provides insights directly applicable to our battle to save the unborn, those born with serious maladies, and the medically dependent elderly. The following is an example of how this works.

The subject area is not important, but the conclusions of a new book are. The author forcefully argues that the leadership of this particular movement is "still fighting the battles of the 1960s."

I think a fair paraphrase of his position would be that for these leaders, it was as if all the changes that had occurred in the last forty years--all the cracks and fissures in what had been a solid and largely unpleasant terrain-- had never occurred. Time has stood still, events were frozen in time.

As I put the book down at 6:45 yesterday morning, my thoughts turned to something we've written about twice in the last two weeks. And that is Ms. magazine's cover story for its fall edition (which is now out) entitled, "We had abortions."

Ms. Magazine is now published by the Feminist Majority Foundation headed by a voice from the past, Eleanor Smeal, formerly president of NOW. The idea is to revisit history, to try to capture the mojo the pro-abortion wing of the feminist movement possessed in 1972.

In that long ago issue, Ms. Magazine "ran a bold petition in which 53 well-known U.S. women declared that they had undergone abortions--despite state laws rendering the procedure illegal." But if (according to Ms. Magazine) "even then, to many it seemed absurd that the government could deny a woman sovereignty over her own body," how much more unfathomable is it to Ms. Smeal that in 2006 an aggressive pro-life movement could be proposing laws across the land?

So, in its fall edition Ms. Magazine ran a new petition with the names of thousands of women who've had abortions, hoping to catch lightening in a bottle. Note the unintended irony of the following paragraph and what it tells us about the dilemma in which Smeal and her cohorts find themselves.

"We know that women who have had abortion have spoken out many times during the last 33 years, and millions of women and men have marched in countless rallies and demonstrations."

True, but not in the way the magazine intends. For if we are matching numbers, far more millions of women and men have marched in opposition to abortion than in support of the slaughter of unborn babies.

And while it is also true that some women who've underground abortions still express support for the "right to abortion," surely the far more significant development post-Roe is the infusion into our Movement of women who deeply regret their decision to abort and grieve for their lost children.
In that vein the symbolism of the turnaround of "Jane Roe" (Norma McCorvey), the Roe of Roe v. Wade, is impossible to blithefully dismiss.

Norma never had an abortion but that didn't stop two unscrupulous pro-abortion attorneys from cunningly using her case to flatten the abortion statutes of all 50 states. Norma is now a well-recognized pro-life figure whose exit from the pro-abortion camp ("Won by Love" is the name of her book) is tremendously powerful.

If that weren't enough, the plaintiff in Roe's companion case--Doe v. Bolton--is also avowedly pro-life. Like Norma McCorvey, Sandra Cano led a hardscrabble, difficult life.

Like Norma she never had an abortion. Like Norma, Sandra's petition to the Supreme Court to reopen her case was denied.

Noteworthy is that Cano never sought an abortion. As she said in a 2000 affidavit: "What I received was something I never requested--the legal right to abort my child." 

But it is not just Eleanor Smeal who is flailing way, hoping against hope that the cracks she sees in support for abortion do not widen to the point where the "right" to abortion tumbles into a legal abyss.

There is a palpable nostalgia among the entire generation that "won" abortion on demand for the "good old days"--a time, they reminisce, when young women would reliably support the pro-abortion movement.

What explains the swing against abortion among younger women and men? Pro-abortionists offer as explanations ignorance, casual acceptance of a right they have always enjoyed ["young women don't know how good they have it"], and what the Marxists like to call a "false consciousness"--the gist of which is that an "oppressed class " (women) unwittingly have adopted the views of their oppressors (men/society/capitalism).

This makes a kind of sense, provided nothing has changed in the past forty years, provided time has stood still. But everything has changed, as a vastly under-appreciated piece that appeared in the August 2005 edition of Glamour magazine documents.

Written by Susan Dominus, it probes the haunting (to pro-abortionists) phenomenon of "The Mysterious Disappearance of Young Pro-Choice Women." What makes this shift all the more significant is that Dominus quotes a Democratic pollster who said that "choice is the only social issue in which you haven't seen them [young people] move to the left."

(You can read this fascinating article in its entirety at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/clinic/shifting/disappear.html)

If I were the other side, I, too, would probably turn a blind eye to all these changes, to pretend that the ground has not shifted beneath my feet. And I would surely leap to embrace the first half of Dominus's formulation--"But is it that young women are taking legal abortion for granted?"--and recoil from the latter, "Or are they just changing their minds about it?"

They are frozen in panic now, paralyzed with fear (to borrow from Bob Dylan), that "[T]he first one now/Will later be last."

If you have any comments or questions, please write Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.