Factoring in the "Abortion Distortion"

By Dave Andrusko

Abortion law is maddeningly complex, Mary Balch says, because of what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once called "the abortion distortion."

"Logic, reason, precedent all go out the window when many courts deal with abortion," the director of NRLC's State Legislative Department told NRL News. "It's like hitting a brick wall: even the most common sense limitations on abortion, measures you think no one could disagree with, come to a grinding halt when many judges get their hands on them." Yet in spite of this enormous obstacle, pro-life legislation does pass, year after year. And NRLC's State Legislative Department can be found in the middle of virtually all pro-life legislation that does make it through the legislative gauntlet.

The reason for this pattern of success is that the department carefully weaves a keen understanding of the abortion distortion into everything it proposes. Two examples illustrate how this works in practice.

Without a thorough grounding in the complex history of abortion jurisprudence, sincere people can offer up proposals which have absolutely no chance of passing the legislature, let alone the Supreme Court. Indeed, sending up legislation to the Supreme Court that straightforwardly flouts the Court's prior decisions sometimes can even set the cause back.

NRLC and its 50 state affiliates operate under the truism, "We are here to make a difference, not a statement."

Second, the State Legislative Department's controlling principle is to offer the strongest possible legislation that will save the most lives.

However, it is not uncommon for relative newcomers - - and even those who have been involved in legislative battles for years - - to push for different legislation that sounds as if it would work better.

For example, it is intuitively appealing to require that a woman contemplating an abortion come twice to the abortion clinic. Forgotten is that the abortion distortion factor also applies to the ingenious ways abortionists undermine the legislative intent.

Abortion clinics, for instance, have taken to charging a pregnant woman a huge fee for the first "counseling" visit - - money which will be lost to her if she doesn't abort but applied to the price of the abortion if she goes ahead. Beyond the high-pressure salesmanship that a pregnant woman will face the entire time she is at the abortion clinic, this means that she also experiences a strong financial inducement to go ahead with the abortion, regardless of how she feels.

When pro-life groups offer competing proposals, "that allows legislators to throw up their hands and say, 'Even the pro-lifers can't agree,' " Balch said.

"I have never said that we originate all the good ideas," she added, "but what we have done here is to carefully listen to every responsible party and then propose laws that have the most strengths and the fewest weaknesses based on over 25 years of experience in the pro-life movement."

This special expertise, Balch said, "means we can propose laws with the best chance to save the most lives."