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NRL News
What a
Visit to NRLC’s National Convention Eleanor Bader is the co-author of a book about abortion with the scary title of Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorists, and a contributor to a number of ultra-liberal publications, including The Progressive. In the magazine’s September issue, Bader writes about the “mood” of NRLC’s national convention, which was held last June in Kansas City, Missouri. In her telling, Bader omits that she did nothing to identify herself as a pro-abortion partisan. In fact we had no idea she had attended until the New York City chapter of NOW announced on its web page that “Reporter and author Eleanor Bader will take us inside the National Right to Life Committee, as she reveals the strategies unveiled at their recent convention held in the wake of the Gonzales v. Carhart decision.” A pro-lifer decided to take up the invitation to “Join NOW-NYC for the inside track on how the anti-choice movement is plotting to take away our reproductive freedom.” What follows is based on what she learned there. What’s fascinating is the gigantic disconnect between the matter-of-fact, plain-vanilla story Bader wrote for The Progressive and the “Holy Cow!” speech she gave in New York July 19. The article, “Glee in the Anti-Abortion Crowd,” managed to accomplish the near-impossible: write a boring account of a convention that rippled with excitement and ran over with important portents for the future. To her credit Bader did mention two important events. First, that three candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination came in person. And, second, Bader discussed a workshop that “intrigued” her—”Lost Fatherhood”—which delved into the significance of an increasingly outspoken voice previously mute: men who had been party to an abortion that they now deeply regretted. But the pardon-me-while-I-stifle-a-yawn tone of the magazine piece was conspicuously absent July 19 when (according to NOW-NYC) “she took a packed crowd inside the meetings and strategy sessions of the movement that has mercilessly chipped away at our reproductive autonomy.” For the most part Bader was able to maintain her cool demeanor, although she often said with considerable feeling how “scary” it all was. Some of the audience’s questions bordered on the hysterical, and as the session went on, Bader and her audience began to feed off of each others’ anxieties. When the time for questions came, a woman asked, in all seriousness, “Has any connection ever been made that these people are the Taliban of our society?” The same woman wondered aloud if stoning women [who had aborted] wasn’t just around the corner. Is this an exaggeration? Judge for yourself as we talk about some of the major points Bader made (minus the foul language). First and foremost, Bader learned that the attendees to the 2007 NRL Convention bore no resemblance to the absurd stereotypes pro-abortionists carry around in their heads to reassure themselves they are fighting idiots. The attendees were not “crackpots,” nor was this a “marginal group of crazies.” Many of the speakers and conveyors were doctors and lawyers and Ph.D.’s and they spoke well and with humor, Bader told her audience. In one very telling moment, near the beginning, Bader told her audience that the more than 500 people (actually, it was more than 1,000) who attended the NRL Convention looked pretty much like ... them! Bader was clearly impressed by the intellectual firepower (“very articulate,” “very charismatic” women) and poise of the speakers. At one point she opines that if you hadn’t taken a college-level statistics course, you’d have problems with one of the workshops. Of course, from our point of view, it was more important that she grasped—and conveyed to her NOW audience—how thoughtful and sophisticated were the pro-life attendees’ questions. Bader was struck by the organizational capacities of the people—NRLC—who put on the convention. “Nothing was more than three minutes late for three days,” she said, adding, “when is the last time you went to a conference where anything started on time?!” As you would expect, Bader and her audience felt free to ridicule and laugh at the workshop about “Lost Fatherhood,” which was led by two men whose girlfriends had had abortions. To the pro-abortionists, talking about the pain abortion causes men—and the guilt these men feel for not supporting women in their hour of need—is just a pro-life PR stunt, an attempt to make men another “victim.” Bader shares that view (this “New Age” stuff can “morph” into “incredible sexism and misogyny at the same time”), but she is smart enough not to allow her bias to obscure the overwhelming importance of this new development. These are men (“very articulate” and “very compelling”) who are pouring out their hearts and their guts. Bader advises that their side needs to figure out a response beyond saying “this is just a bunch of ... .” There is a wealth of extremely revealing material from the speech and follow up questions which tells us much about how unsettled pro-abortionists are. What probably frightens them more than anything (except, perhaps, the impact of ultrasounds) is our Movement’s outreach to young people. To the NOW set, pro-lifers are either Catholics or “fundamentalists,” and the young people who are so involved in the Movement are little pots of clay that older extremists are molding into younger extremists. Thus to be told that there are teenagers participating in a two-week youth camp in Wisconsin (this “incredibly scary camp”) where they learn how to run meetings, raise funds, speak to elected officials—the “whys and wherefores of activism”—took Bader’s breath away. Why? Largely, I suspect, “because we don’t have summer camps.” If that weren’t ominous enough, the leader of this Wisconsin teen camp is “a beautiful woman,” a “together” woman who does not fit their stereotype (not a single gingham apron). But worse even than this army of young extremists-in-the-making is that the undeniable fact that the leadership of the Movement is largely female! How in the world can Bader and her audience live with such shocking news? By weaving it into a threatening narrative, plucked straight out of the sci-fi classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Everyone looks normal, but that is merely an illusion. Some alien force (my guess is they believe it’s spores from outer space, loaded with “patriarchal society” DNA) landed in the Midwest in the mid-1970s. It has changed these poor women—the same women Bader previously lauds for intelligence, beauty, organizational abilities, and insight—into automatons who will buy into an agenda that is clearly not in their self-interest. Stepford wives, anyone? It’s a really scary time to be a pro-abortionist. |