Late Term Abortion

 

Once again, pro-abortionists pretend it is pro-lifers, not themselves, who are wildly out of the mainstream

 

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-abortion Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D)

There are many “givens” in the abortion debate. When it comes to how the issue is covered, for example, no mistake/misstatement/gaffe by a pro-lifer goes without a merciless skewering. Conversely, there is no end to the praise heaped on a pro-abortionist no matter how out of touch with public opinion, no matter how genuinely radical his or her position may be. Heads we lose, tails they win.
We’ve already written several times about House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s astonishingly ignorant attack on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. When her over-the-top, wholly inaccurate statement was called into question—Pelosi had stated flatly “They are saying that there’s no abortion. They want to make it a federal law that there be no abortion in our country,” which was understood to refer to H.R. 179–she got a free pass anyway.

You knew Democratic Texas state Senator Wendy Davis would be elevated to superstar status when she filibustered an omnibus pro-life bill. And so she has. Now her name is brought up as a potential gubernatorial candidate. Besides her “iconic” pink sneakers, why?
The inference is that unlike pro-life Republicans, Davis had her finger on the pulse of the people, particularly women when she helped waylay a bill that included a provision to protect from abortion unborn babies who are capable of feeling pain –excruciating pain.

More than a few pro-life commentators—and some more in the middle—have made the self-evident point (self-evident, that is, unless you are taking your own pulse) that support for abortion of babies that far along is totally lacking. Big time. And has been for decades. That simply doesn’t get mentioned in the puff pieces about Davis supposedly standing up to the “good old boys.”
Just to list two examples. as we reported at the time, back in January Gallup reported that “support drops off sharply, to 27%, for second-trimester abortions, and further still, to 14%, for third-trimester abortions. Gallup has found this pattern each time it has asked this question since 1996, indicating that Americans attach much greater value to the fetus as it approaches viability, starting in the second trimester.”

Notice the words “starting in the second trimester.” The question Gallup asked what “Do you think abortion should generally be legal or generally illegal…in the second three months of pregnancy?” Only 27% said legal to 64% who said illegal.
More recently there was the Texas Tribune poll which found that 62% would “support prohibiting abortions after 20 weeks.” The story that included this finding did its best to suggest that Texas is not a strong pro-life state by posing a series of seriously misleading questions.
That methodology notwithstanding, the Tribune’s Ross Ramsey also noted that “Laws restricting abortion should be stricter, according to 38 percent of the respondents, while 26 percent said the laws should be less strict and 21 percent said they should be left as they are now.” In plain English, half again as many Texans wanted stricter abortion laws as those who wanted less strict laws.
Another given—a subset of the one mentioned at the beginning—is that pro-life lawmakers will always suffer whenever the topic is brought up. The abortion issue “cuts” against them. Really?

Kristen Powers

You probably remember columnist and commentator Kirsten Powers, who we wrote about at length a couple of months ago. The work of Powers, along with that of GetReligion’s Mollie Hemingway, were the primary fulcrum that leveraged at least some mainstream media coverage of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial.
She has written another brilliant piece for The Daily Beast, “I don’t stand with Wendy Davis.”
As she did with the (non-)coverage of the Gosnell trial, Powers refuses to turn this into a male/female battle. She reminds her readers of what doesn’t get discussed—for example, the development points unborn babies have already reached and yet can still be killed.
Powers also writes about another component of the law, which was reintroduced Monday—
“regulations on abortion clinics similar to what was passed in Pennsylvania in 2011 after the Gosnell horror. The New York Times warned that the Texas bill ‘could lead to the closing of most of Texas’s 42 abortion clinics.’  That sounds familiar.

“In 2011, the Pennsylvania ACLU claimed a post-Gosnell bill ‘would effectively close most and maybe all of the independent abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.’ Last month, a Pennsylvania news site reported that ‘several’ abortion clinics have closed, which isn’t quite the Armageddon the abortion-rights movement predicted.”

Powers’ conclusion is so powerful it must be quoted in its entirety. She wrote

“Human-rights movements have traditionally existed to help the voiceless and those without agency gain progressively more rights. Yet in the case of abortion, the voiceless have progressively lost rights at the hands of people who claim to be human-rights crusaders. Abortion-rights leaders have turned the world upside down.

“They want us to believe that a grown woman is voiceless, that she has less agency than the infant in her womb who relies on her for life. A woman has so little agency, we are told, that she is incapable of getting an abortion before the fifth month of her pregnancy. To suggest she should do so is a ‘war on women.’ It’s an insult to women dressed up as “women’s rights.”

“On ABC’s This Week, Peggy Noonan responded to the chants of ‘I stand with Wendy’ by noting, ‘What she is … standing for is something we would recognize as infanticide, late-term abortion, the taking of a little child’s life.’ Standing for that is not heroic, and it is not something to be cheered.”

Source: NRLC News