Planned Parenthood and Abortion

 

Further reflections on Cecile Richards’ claim that having an abortion “wasn’t a difficult decision“ for her

By Dave Andrusko

Cecile Richards

Earlier this week a story we posted discussed an interview PPFA’s Cecile Richards gave to Cosmopolitan magazine. It was part of a larger piece on Richards late-in-the-game decision to talk about her abortion. (See “PPFA’s Richards completes Trifecta of non-confessionals”)
Other pro-lifers have also touched on that story and, as we did, placed the Cosmopolitan interview alongside an interview with Elle magazine that ran in October. (See our take on the Elle interview.) This prompted me to take a second look at both.

Personally, I am not exactly shocked that Richards should pronounce what her goal is:

We want to make it completely unacceptable to run for office as someone who opposes women’s rights or wants to take us backward.

As long as they play fair (grandly, this is probably an oxymoron for pro-abortionists), that’s the way the system works. We all try to elect candidates congenial to our values and aspirations.
The critical difference, in this instance, is that what to Richards is going “backwards” is, in truth, going forwards. Step by step we are attempting to bring unborn babies up to where they were before abortion “reform” began its regressive, wayward march: under the mantle of the protection of law. And, of course, 50%+ of those babies lost to abortion are females.

Today I’m using the Cosmopolitan interview as a jumping off point to check the triumphs/victories pro-abortionists claimed for themselves in 2014. Richards talked about some not unexpected victories before shifting to

some beginning connections to the fact that women’s access to health care and rights are directly related to women’s economic opportunities and educational opportunities. We need to make that even more explicit.

What does that mean? Exactly what you think it means. Support for abortion will win in areas of the country which are blue-blue. But if you look at the numbers that came out of the 2014 off-year elections, pro-abortion candidates not only got their clocks cleaned, they were (as in Colorado) mocked for their incessant Johnny One-Note campaigns. Outgoing Colorado Senator Mark Udall was dubbed by a reporter for the Denver Post “Mark Uterus.”
So Richards and her colleagues keep looking to wrap abortion (“women’s access to health care and rights”) in more and more layers of issues that are not (like abortion) non-starters for so many people—such as “women’s economic opportunities and educational opportunities.”

Ms. Magazine had to scrape and scrap to find “6 Applause-Worthy Pro-Choice Victories of 2014” which included one from England and another made possible only by misreading opinion polls. 

An important consideration, which we’ve touched on before, drawn from the interviews with Elle and Cosmopolitan. From Richards’ viewpoint as president of the largest abortion provider in the known galaxy, she’s not going to talk haltingly about her abortion or own up to even the mildest reservations.
Her abortion (according to Elle) “wasn’t a difficult decision”; “the right decision for me and my husband and wasn’t a difficult decision” (a video for ”The 1 in 3 campaign”); and even no big deal for her kids (according to Cosmopolitan).

Richards said when she opened up to Elle, her children’s response to learning they were short a sibling

was really awesome. It’s interesting, I just talked to my kids the other day, and they knew I’d had an abortion, and they were sort of like, “Mom, it was no big deal,” but I could also tell it was important to them that we talked about it. I look at the positive response from Planned Parenthood employees……[etc., etc., etc.]

But can that possibly be true? If it was “no big deal,” how and why could she tell “it was important to them that we talked about it”?

Think about for a moment. You know your mom is a big shot in the “pro-choice” movement, runs in powerful circles, and is joined at the hip to pro-abortion President of the United States.
But while your mom has talked about being non-judgmental; about how having an abortion is easy as pie; about “freeing women,” you didn’t know until a couple of months ago that she non-judgmentally freed herself by having an easy-as-pie abortion of your brother or sister.
Of course that would be a big deal, which is why my sympathies immediately went out to Richards’ children.

I would bet a pretty penny that contrary to Richards’ characterization, that family discussion was intensely emotional and is one that the children may still be working their way through.

Source: NRLC News