Pro-Abortion Movement

 

Watching the Pro-Abortion Movement splinter apart

By Dave Andrusko

Carter Eskew

With great interest and amusement we’ve written about the more obvious manifestations of the intra-squad squabbles within the pro-abortion team that went public when Planned Parenthood lowered its “pro-choice” flag in January 2013.
Some opponents of the move were just nostalgic, others saw it as giving away a rallying cry that still resonated, still others wondered if it wasn’t an admission that they had lost control of the political debate (which they had).

As the pro-abortion movement continues to fragment (it’s already broken into many shards), there is an ongoing fight over what will be the new language (the favorites are “reproductive justice” and “reproductive health”) ; who deserves credit for developing the idiom and/or promoting it; and how this all ties into the continued widening of the circle of issues that some pro-abortionists insist must fall within the rubric of “reproductive justice”/“reproductive health.” (Hint: you would be surprised. The issues covers everything from soup to nuts.)

That overlaps with the in-house fighting over who buried the “pro-choice” slogan first and after-the-fact complaints that it was never any good in the first place. A recent example of that was the Washington Post op-ed written by Carter Eskew, a founding partner of the Glover Park Group public relations firm, which has done a lot of work for Planned Parenthood. (He got his ears boxed by PPFA for the column, but that’s another post.)

Eskew celebrated a prior op-ed by Janet Harris who promoted the idea that it is absurd to ever hint that having an abortion was a “difficult decision.” Worse, to suggest that abortion does raise ethical and moral concerns, puts pro-abortionists on the defensive, a theme Eskew hardily seconds
“The pro-choice side cannot win the debate as it is currently framed; it can achieve only small victories when the other side overreaches,” he wrote. “The problem is ‘choice’ will never trump ‘life.’ Choice is valuable, but life is precious. As long as there is no competing affirmative value for abortion, then life will always win.”

So what is the “competing affirmative value for abortion,” according to Eskew.

“A small, brave cohort of women have come forward to affirm the positive value of abortion in their own lives. Their explanations present a promising, new message frame for abortion rights, centered on not just freedom of ‘choice’ but on the benefits of the outcome of choice.”

Sorry, I don’t mean to be dense but isn’t that the argument they have made for decades? Aborting an inconvenient baby means a woman doesn’t get slowed down in her race to succeed?
The “difference” in the latest iterations is that, like Janet Harris, they come across as colder than fish, morally tone-deaf, and utterly indifferent to the serious qualms most people—including many self-identified “pro-choicers”—have about abortion, especially abortion on demand.

So at the same time they expand the number of issues falling under their “reproductive justice” tent, by their callous language they are excluding more and more and more Americans.

Source: NRLC News