Editor's note. Please be sure to read Part Two, which is Jacki Ragan's sage advice on grassroots involvement. Please send your thoughts to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

As surely as the swallows return to Capistrano, each presidential year a squadron of "horror stories" flies in, dropping warning about what allegedly would happen should Roe v. Wade be overturned. Linda Hirshman winged one this morning for the Washington Post. It's the usual hyperbole times five--one for every week until the American public decides between pro-life Sen. John McCain and pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama.

Rather than rebut the usual usuals, it's more helpful to look at one of the questions asked this afternoon at a follow-up online chat with Hirshman.

Both the inquiry and the response tell us a lot.

A woman asked, "I'd like to hear your comments on the fact that the current climate already has made it difficult for women to seek abortions [i.e., a 24-hour-waiting period], with the reduction of number of clinics and some doctors not performing the procedure."

Hirshman's measured, calm, stick with the facts answer?

"There is a kind of cultural divide already rending the United States, even with Roe on the books," she wrote online. "Abortion turns out to stand for many very difficult aspects of modernity: gender equality, female empowerment, female control over their own futures (this was Betty Friedan's crucial insight all those years ago, what distinguishes humans from animals). Modernity also brings with it urbanism, industrial and post-industrial economies, racial diversity, secularism. People fear and hate modernity for some or all of those reasons, and the cultural war on abortion clinics and doctors creates abortion-free zones, such as you describe, which seem to give some symbolic satisfaction to people who cannot otherwise escape the other aspects of modern life."

Whoa! So, the reason for the "current climate" is that you and I are ill at ease with modernity and get only "symbolic satisfaction" out of the fact that there are many areas of this country where unborn babies are not torn apart on a 9-5 basis?

I have no quarrel with pro-abortionists making their "best case" for why it is acceptable--indeed, to them, a good thing--that thousands of babies are slaughtered each and every day. But why not at least take a pass at understanding why there is even more resistance today to abortion on demand than there was when Justice Harry Blackmun reached into his jurisprudential hat and pulled out the "right" to abortion.

What is "modern" about executing your own child? How does "gender equality, female empowerment, female control over their own futures" square with the fact that over half of the children smashed to smithereens are females? And, by the way, I think it would be fair to ask whether Betty Friedan herself may have eventually worried whether the modern feminist movement had gone overboard in putting abortion advocacy at the top of its priority list.

With the exception of a tiny minority at places like PPFA and NARAL, everybody is (at a minimum) uncomfortable and uneasy with abortion on demand and very much welcomes the decrease in the number of abortions the last half-decade.

Not so with the Abortion Establishment, which dreads the reduction in the number of deaths. Is that unfair to say? Then why is passage of the "Freedom of Choice Act" near the very top of its priority list?

FOCA is passionately embraced by pro-abortion Sen. Obama and is intended to kill all limitations on abortions as surely as partial-birth abortions kill unborn babies inches away from a live birth. The number of abortions would increase as surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. They know it, we know it.

Be sure to read the October issue of National Right to Life News. In it we offer the definitive critique of FOCA and how this completely undermines Sen. Obama's pretense to wanting to "reduce" the number of abortions.

Part Two -- DOs and DON'Ts: Grassroots Involvement and 2008