NRL News
Page 2
April 2009
Volume 36
Issue 5

“A New Way of Thinking” Means More Abortions
By Dave Andrusko

You can tell pro-abortionists are riding high, brimming with confidence, when they bluntly tell you that their proposals will kill more babies and smoothly assure you that even pro-lifers ought to be able to see that this really the solution to our “toxic” abortion debate.

The Clintonian blather about making abortion “safe, legal, and rare” treated people who were not knowledgeable about the reality of abortion on demand as if they were idiots. The author of “Safe, Legal & Early—A New Way of Thinking about Abortion” assumes that the arrival of pro-abortion President Barack Obama has reduced the brains of pro-lifers to mush and shredded their consciences.

Writing at AOL’s PoliticsDaily.com, it’s as if Steven Waldman has placed his arm around our shoulders, counseling us to be grateful for the chance to sell out every principle by which we live for the greater good of ending the interminable abortion debate.

Waldman, editor in chief of beliefnet.com, has been a key player in assembling a flying wedge of religious “Third Way” blockers for Obama and other pro-abortion Democrats. Under the transparently insincere guise of finding a way out of what Waldman called the “toxic” debate over abortion, their objective is to open massive holes in the pro-life community’s defenses. If even some pro-lifers can be persuaded that our approach is futile (and perhaps even “immoral”!), Obama and his pro-abortion allies will not only sprint to complete their entire agenda but also do so in way advertised as “bringing together” pro-lifers and “pro-choicers.”

His proposal is a complicated piece with many working parts. But its launching point is the manner in which Waldman handles survey results showing (in one poll he cites) that 69% say that abortion is the “taking of a human life,” but “72 percent believe it should be legal.” What conclusion should we draw?

His answer is that, “Most Americans believe there are gradations of life. Some living things are more alive than others, and so the later in the pregnancy it gets, the more uncomfortable people become with the idea of ending it. But in reality they believe both that a life stirs very early on and that a one-week-old embryo is more ‘killable’ than a nine-month-old fetus. For them, determining whether ‘life’ begins at conception really doesn’t determine anything.”

Waldman counsels pro-lifers and pro-choicers to come together not to reduce the number of abortions but to ensure that they take place earlier. “Success would be measured on the basis of moving abortions earlier in the gestational cycle—even if that conceivably means more overall abortions,” he writes. “It would be not about whether, how or how many, but when. Not ‘safe, legal and rare’ as Bill Clinton once said, but ‘safe, legal and early.’”

In exchange for giving up the core convictions that have served as our true North, pro-lifers can console themselves with the thought that there might be a “less toxic debate.”

To soften resistance to this balderdash, Waldman grossly underestimates Roe v. Wade’s radical holding and treats the complexity of early human development as if it is essentially glorified bacteria. In the former he borrows from Justice Blackmun’s this-is-no-big-deal spin. Waldman manages to miss that so tenaciously did the Court hold on to that radical regime that it took 34 years for the justices to choose not to strike down a ban enacted by the Congress of the United States on a grotesque abortion technique inflicted on a mature baby inches away from a live delivery. If that expansive definition of the “right” to abortion isn’t extreme, I can’t imagine what qualifies.

In his attempt to persuade the reader that massively increasing the number of “earlier” abortions ought not to bother anyone, Waldman says that an “embryo is a clump of undifferentiated cells.” “Embryo” is the term given the child through the eighth week.

By this time (just to offer a few highlights) the child has a beating heart, brain waves can be measured, the baby is swallowing amniotic fluid, and taste and teeth buds are beginning to form. Hardly “a clump of undifferentiated cells.”

Now, it is quite true that pro-lifers believe (paraphrasing Dr. Seuss) that “a life is a life, no matter how small.” Pro-lifers of faith may come to this conclusion out of a recognition that God is the Author of life and therefore (to quote Waldman) that “a life that God creates on Day One is morally equivalent to a life at month one or month nine or 18 years.”

But people of any faith or no faith or even those who hate people of faith can and do come to the same conclusion—that this life ought to be protected—for a raft of reasons, including Ben Franklin’s immortal truism that we hang together or we hang separately.

Waldman attempts to turn the tables on pro-lifers. Hey, you guys may believe that a very “early” abortion is as abhorrent as a much later abortion. “But if you believe that the later an abortion happens, the more fully human the fetus has become then a strategy of delay is immoral.”

In other words any and all efforts that result in giving women the opportunity to make a decision after considering what she is doing and to whom—rather than out of sheer panic—is immoral, if that woman is “forced” to abort later than she would have. I suspect he is particularly unnerved by the use of ultrasounds, which can have a transformative impact on whether a woman or girl aborts.

The other fascinating comment is a backhanded admission that the legal status of abortion is unconscionable. If you eliminate everything early in the pregnancy (including requiring parental notification) and kill many more kids earlier, well that helps Waldman out of a particularly troublesome corner.

“By pushing toward earlier abortions, policy could indirectly limit one of the most ethically problematic types of abortions: those done to select for factors like gender or fetal abnormalities,” Waldman writes. “It’s difficult to find out many characteristics of the child if it’s being aborted in the first week. These policies would therefore push away from eugenically oriented abortions.”

Get it? If you find it insanely inconsistent to abort females in the name of women’s equality, Waldman has just the answer: obliterate her before we know she is a she. Now there’s a profile in courage.

The really toxic idea is that we just ought to make our peace with the notion that many people will now and forever extend protection only to babies who most closely resemble “real” babies. With that in mind consider this excerpt from a respondent to another writer on the beliefnet.com blog who answered the thrust of Waldman’s “new” argument in an absolutely brilliant fashion. He or she took that logic in a different direction.

Yet perhaps most Americans believe there are gradations of life. Some living things are “more alive”—that would be the ones who are most like us ... . Maybe for some people of European extraction, a really black, black person is more “killable” than a Nordic blonde. Or for some dark-skinned persons, it’s more evil, more of a “hate crime” to kill a kill of person of color than it is to kill a person of—uh, pallor.

So success in terms of “Sanctity of Life” would be measured on the basis of moving homicides more towards the other end of the spectrum from one’s own complexion. It would be not about whether, how or how many, but what color. Not homicides being “safe, legal and rare” as some would have it, but “safe, legal and some other race.”