The abortion plank in the Democratic platform is very much worth reading. You can find this, along with all the rest of the document, at www.democrats.org/platform/.
For pro-lifers, there are two main areas of interest. Under the section, "Strong Healthy Families," there is a subhead titled, "Reforming Health Care." If you go there, you find a section headlined, "Investing in science to battle disease." It reads,
"We will push the boundaries of science in search of new medical therapies and cures. The Bush Administration has put ideology over science, skewing information about everything from women's health to scientific research. ...
President Bush has rejected the calls from Nancy Reagan, Christopher Reeve and Americans across the land for assistance with embryonic stem cell research. We will reverse his wrongheaded policy. Stem cell therapy offers hope to more than 100 million Americans who have serious illnesses - - from Alzheimer's to heart disease to juvenile diabetes to Parkinson's. We will pursue this research under the strictest ethical guidelines, but we will not walk away from the chance to save lives and reduce human suffering."
About the first paragraph, this is straight pro-abortion boilerplate and not worth any further discussion. About paragraph number two, there is much to say, especially in light of Ron Reagan, Jr.'s speech to the convention. You can read all about it at length at "Today's News & Views" (www.nrlc.org) and the editorial that appears on page two of this issue.
Princeton Professor Robert F. George did a nice job deconstructing what he described as Reagan's "breathtakingly irresponsible" speech. Writing for National Review Online, Prof. George observed, "After promising to 'do justice to the science,' Ron Reagan described the process of obtaining embryonic stem cells in a way that left out the fact that the cloning process he described creates a human embryo which is killed in order to harvest its stem cells.... Ron Reagan was careful not to use the word 'cloning,' though that is exactly what he was describing...."
And, of course, all the promises Reagan made for cloning were not only sheer speculation, they also carefully avoided even mentioning the real progress made using non-embryonic sources.
The second section in John Kerry's and John Edwards's party platform of particularly relevance to us is under the section titled, "A Strong American Community." It reads, "We will defend the dignity of all Americans against those who would undermine it. Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman's right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare."
NRL Political Director Carol Tobias rebuts all the silliness found in this section in her story found on page one. Suffice it to say it tells the 47% of the party which opposes Roe v. Wade that they are "Republicans."
Do the authors of the platform, along with John Kerry and John Edwards, realize how widespread opposition to Roe is within their own rank and file? All we can say for sure is that, living in the cocoon of national Democratic Party politics, they probably vastly underestimate how completely out-of-step they are with grassroots Democrats!