Abortion and Politics

 

Abortion and the 2014 elections

By Dave Andrusko

Jason Villalba

“Abortion as an issue returns to 2014 elections” ran one very typical recent headline, in this case headlining an Associated Press story. And reports are that the sun rose in the east this morning.
It’s both the nature of who they are as people (just like you and me) and the business of journalism that results in stories that read like sports features. Reporters speak with utter assurance only to subsequently discover they were 100% off base. And, in both instances—“hard news” and sports—it’s rare when anyone acknowledges they have completely flipped.
So why did so many reporters believe/hope the issue would go “poof”? Well, to be fair, some were much too smart to believe that the setbacks pro-lifers suffered last November would disable the Movement—that somehow people who’d given decades of their lives would suddenly abandoned the children because things did not go the way we wanted on the national scene.

But, to return to the “returns,” one reason you get these stories is that it offers unsympathetic reporters the chance to grind their axe (an axe that is not going to get sharper, by the way): that all those “extremist” pro-lifers had overshot the mark (“overreached” in the AP story).
In other words, it’s GOOD that abortion is back as an issue because those whacko pro-lifers are going to get their clocks cleaned at the polls. Again, another example of the wish being father to the thought. Why not?
As we’ve already discussed today at nrlc.cc/15IfUCd and nrlc.cc/14UsDRb, in the era of Kermit Gosnell, pro-abortionists know they are on the short end of the stick. The more frequently they denounce bans on abortions that kill pain-capable unborn children, the more they remind the public that there is no abortion, EVER, that they would prohibit. And that Gosnell made millions off of late abortions in his “House of Horrors.”

Likewise, screaming that abortion mills—sorry, abortion clinics—will be forced out of business if they are required to meet commonsense codes reads well when no one is there to counter the mythology. But the issue is not whether the profit margins of abortion industry may be shaved a tiny bit but whether we are serious about ensuring that there are no more Kermit Gosnells.
Indeed the more this conversation is raised, the more often we learn that even the crown jewel of the Abortion Industry—Planned Parenthood—has crummy facilities and abortionists who are far faster than they are skilled at tearing unborn babies out of women’s wombs. (See nrlc.cc/15IbfAq; nrlc.cc/15IbmMi; nrlc.cc/14UoDQQ; and, most recently, nrlc.cc/14UoPPY.)

What happens in Texas is freighted with symbolic and substantive meaning. As NPR (not exactly a hotbed of pro-life sympathies) put it, “First, Texas is the second most populous state in the nation, with four major cities and 5.5 million women of reproductive age. …And symbolically, Texas was home to Jane Roe, whose fight for a legal abortion went all the way to the Supreme Court — which decided in 1973 that abortion is a woman’s fundamental right under the Constitution.”
And passage of HB 2 “completely reshape the abortion landscape in the state,” says Elizabeth Nash, who follows state issues at the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research group. “With this legislation, Texas will become one of the most restrictive states in the country. And Texas really matters.”
(By the way, if we are looking for “symbols,” what could be more symbolic than that “Jane Roe”—aka Norma McCorvey—never had an abortion and is now pro-life! Or that her pro-abortion attorneys cruelly and malevolently exploited McCorvey, including lying about the circumstances under which she became pregnant?)

My favorite example of this kind of story—where the reporter is a megaphone for pro-abortion talking points—came from NBC News. “The attention these battles have generated has made Democrats downright giddy,” writes an equally giddy Michael O’Brien. “’These are like layups on a five-foot rim,’ said Brad Woodhouse, the president of the liberal advocacy group Americans United for Change. ‘I think the way that they’re conducting themselves gives me more hope for the immediate political consequences than I’d had they followed through on what they said they’d do after the election.’”
Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

 

When you watched the ferocious debate in Texas last week, you saw other sights and symbols.
On the pro-abortion side, you watched virtually out-of-control people, veins popping in their necks, hating on pro-lifers; and pro-abortion state legislators dragging out (yet again!) coat hangers.
On the pro-life side, sets of babies shoes and an ultrasound held by State Rep. Jason Villalba of his own child at 13 weeks. “I will fight, and I will fight, and I will fight to protect my baby.’”
Which do you think is more persuasive?

Source: NRLC News