EDITORIALS

By Dave Andrusko

A "Real Image Problem" for Pro-Abortionists

It's no secret to the very sharp, very perceptive people who read National Right to Life News that our opponents are in the midst of a profound reappraisal and refurbishing forced on them by a metamorphosis in public opinion, especially among the young. Once upon a time, all shadow of doubt had fled. Now they are plagued with anxiety.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, in another context, talked about what happens when an "undebated, unlegislated, unvoted, unnegotiated revolution" is foisted on the American public by activist courts. That is exactly what the Supreme Court did in 1973 when, like a cockeyed jeweler, it held a few penumbras and "zones of privacy" up to the light and, voila, discovered a "right" to abortion.

Author and journalist Cynthia Gorney was simply stating the obvious when she once described the Supreme Court as "the 800 pound gorilla - - it sits where it wants, it does what it wants." Untethered by a respect for the Constitution, the fetid writings of justices such as the late Harry Blackmun are a breeding ground for lethal mischief. (See "The Blackmun Papers,"page 10.)

But the fear and apprehensiveness is almost palpable, as you can glean from even a cursory reading of the other side or its legions of sympathetic journalists. To take one of many examples of how they feel besieged on so many different fronts there is an extraordinary piece that appeared at www.slate.com February 5 written by Liza Mundy.

It begins as a thinly disguised assault on the President's Council on Bioethics (described in the piece as the "Kass Commission," after its chairman Leon Kass), which has done some good work and - - from the pro-abortion set's perspective - - threatens to do more. Mundy describes the "pro-choicers'" fear: that the Kass commission "intends to use [an upcoming] IVF [in vitro fertilization] report as part of a back-door anti-abortion mission, further eroding abortion rights by granting the embryo enhanced moral standing."

Then, without warning, Mundy abruptly takes the reader behind the scenes: "But privately, what has pro-choicers unnerved is their own failure to face up to the issues posed by the profitable and ever-growing field of high-tech babymaking."

What's intriguing for us is what Mundy describes as the "internal tensions" within "pro-choice" groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Let me offer a lengthy quote that puts the dilemma in a nutshell:

"Some of these [internal tensions] came to light last summer, when a Newsweek article on the 'fetal rights' movement pointed out that the latest reproductive technologies - - providing, as they do, the ability to see embryos sooner and cultivating, as they do, an atmosphere in which pregnant women happily scrapbook those early ultrasounds - - have created a real image problem for the pro-choice movement. As Kirsten Moore, the president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, put it, the piece 'kind of prompted us to realize, oh my God, our movement's messages suck.'" A member of the pro-abortion inner sanctum is saying their spiel is hopelessly out of date.

According to Ms. Mundy, the "reproductive-rights community" has held "a series of quiet conversations" to address the disconnect between their abortion-now-and-forever rhetoric and the fact that "a woman desperately hoping for a positive pregnancy test has a whole new attitude toward the embryo.

"'Women in their 20s and 30s are probably more worried that their eggs are going to age than whether they're going to be able to obtain an abortion,' Moore acknowledges."

Consultants were then called in. They "urged abortion rights groups to 'reframe the debate' and 'take back' words like 'baby' and 'mother.'"

Just how seriously the "reproductive-rights community" takes all this is shown in this quote from Paul Root Wolpe, a bio-ethicist from the University of Pennsylvania. Wolpe told Mundy, "Unless Planned Parenthood can grapple with the bioethical issues of reproductive life in the 21st century, it's going to be left behind."

Mundy writes, "Supporting abortion rights is one thing when it involves a desperate woman or girl. What about when it involves a fertility doctor implanting five embryos to raise his own clinic success rates, knowing he can then use selective reduction, which is essentially abortion by toxic injection, to winnow them down?"

Mundy put it succinctly: If you are Planned Parenthood, must you feel "OK" with any and every scenario?

Last point: Mundy argues that "the abortion-rights groups" and the "infertility-patients groups" would "seem to be natural allies." However a "real standoff" looms. Why? Because their agendas are not synonymous.

Pamela Madsen, the head of the American Infertility Association, snarls at the very thought of federal authorities taking a closer look at the reproductive technology industry, which is almost completely unregulated.

But Madsen also tells Mundy, "We're about creating life, not ending it....We're the put them in people, not the take them out people."

They are caught yet again in their own pregnant-woman-as-property-owner worldview. However, as Mundy writes, pro-abortionists are responding. They are taking their consultants' advice to "reframe the debate" and "take back" words like "baby" and "mother."

But as my old pastor used to say about counterfeits, you don't have to know all the ways something can be faked. All you need to know is the real thing.

And you above all others know the real thing: love for both mother and unborn child that can't be faked, because it comes from the heart.

Dave Andrusko can be reached at daveandrusko@hotmail.com