"And At What Cost?" The Dilemma Deepens -- Part One of Two

This edition (in conjunction with Monday's) attempts to merge two distinct but I believe inter-related ideas. My goal is to deepen our understanding of what can only be described as panic among our benighted opposition. Panic? What do I mean?

For as long as I can remember the linchpin of pro-abortion success at fending off pro-lifers was the insistence that they supported women ("women's rights") while pro-lifers "obsessed" (their favorite condescending/condemnatory description) on the unborn. The false dichotomy served two purposes.

First, it contrasted the concreteness of a visible "flesh and blood" woman versus what was, not so long ago, almost an abstraction--the largely out of sight, largely out of mind unborn child. Second, it maliciously pitted our concern for the hapless unborn child against her mother, as if our hearts had room enough for only one.

This served to reinforce the notion not only that we had a "fetish" (another favorite dismissive label) for the unborn but that we were utterly indifferent/callous to her mother. In other words, we were compulsive (and stupid) as well as insensitive.

Well, guess what? As we have enjoyed more and more success getting out our message of love and concern for both mother AND child, it has dawned on the pro-abortionists and their legion of allies in the media that they are rapidly losing a trump card. What to do?

Sarah Blustain's and Reva Siegel's "Pro-Lifers' Frightening New Tactic," which appears in the October issue of "The American Prospect," is only the most recent example of how they are attempting to wiggle out of a corner. Don't take pro-life professions of concern seriously, they insist, it's all politics.

Pro-lifers don't really care a twit about pregnant women in difficult straits. We are cynically using "women-protective" language just to spruce up our image and carry the day in the legislatures. (So much for the thousands of women-helping crisis pregnancy centers that have dotted the landscape for more than 30 years.)

Or when peer-reviewed articles appear documenting abortion's deleterious effects on women, all you need know is that this is bogus science. (See below.)

Or when we talk about abortion rupturing the most fundamental bond in human culture--that between a mother and her developing child--it is nothing more than an attempt "to preserve traditional roles of women," by restoring to reasoning that was "commonplace" in the "19th century."

Furthermore, when we talk about much older men impregnating younger women (actually girls), this is not a grim reality that even Planned Parenthood's think tank cautiously acknowledges to be true but merely represents more paternalistic/chauvinistic gibberish.

It's important to observe that Blustain and Siegel hardly bother to engage the mounting evidence that you find emotionally and physically maimed women strewn along abortion's bloody trail. But why would they?

Hasn't one of the most rabidly pro-abortion congressmen on Capital Hill [how's that for an unbiased source?] produced a report debunking abortion's impact on future fertility, the detrimental mental health impact of abortion, and the link between induced abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer? No, he hadn't, and had Blustain and Siegel taken a more careful, comprehensive reading of the literature, it might have resulted in a less cavalier dismissal.

At the same time Blustain and Siegel acknowledge that thousands and thousands of personal testimonies exist, they do so only to marginalize the pain, hurt, and agony. They tell their readers that since pro-lifers don't have the science, we rely on "dramatic and often touching stories of individual women who feel it is legal abortion that allowed them to be coerced into giving up pregnancies they wanted to continue." Elsewhere in the article they casually mention that there are thousands of such testimonies!

Talk about schizophrenia. There is so much evidence that abortion is an awful decision that they have to be nimble just to avoid tripping over it.

But to accordance with the party line, pro-abortionists must insist that cutting off tiny heads and arms is the least bad decision. This is hooey, as parts of this article and another that Blustain wrote in 2004 for the same magazine, indirectly acknowledge.

Just two years ago Blustain wrote this. Abortion "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.' …

"After all, abortion is a right that ends in sorrow, not celebration. It's not like women's suffrage or the equal access to public accommodations, rights whose outcome is emotionally unambiguous. The vocabulary that was so powerful in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s means something different today. … The national debates [on other issues] and, yes, on abortion -- have underscored the nuances. The question no longer seems as simple as, 'Are you for or against?' We are for. But how are we for, to what extent, and at what cost?"

Indeed, consider the cost! We'll talk more about these costs on Monday. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.

Part 2