Interesting pair of commentaries in the Los Angeles Times tell us a lot about the state of the abortion battle and the disarray within the pro-abortion community.
First an editorial praises two decisions that struck down Mississippi’s and Alabama’s laws requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Then an opinion piece by a veteran pro-abortion war horse, Carla Hall, who laments that the infighting over the decision to kind of, sort of retired the “pro-choice” label could deemphasize the obsession with abortion.
We’ve already cribbed from the dissent by Judge Emilio M. Garza to debunk the appeals court decision in the Mississippi case which applies as well to U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s decision Monday to gut Alabama’s law. In both instances (as is the case currently being heard about a similar Texas law), the impact of a supposed lack of “access” is vastly overstated. For example, in Texas, you’d never know that that Planned Parenthood is, or soon will be, building two mega-abortion clinics, or that in Alabama the two largest abortion clinics are unaffected by the requirement since they have abortionists with admitting privileges.
But all you really need to know about the Alice-in-Wonderland world these folks live in can be found near the end of the Times’ editorial:
“Abortion is one of a variety of medical procedures routinely performed outside of hospitals and surgical centers by healthcare professionals who do not possess hospital admitting privileges. Dentists, for instance, perform procedures on patients who occasionally have complications and must go to an emergency room.”
Yank a tooth, yank an arm off an unborn baby—what’s the difference? Both are “safe” and “patients” can always go to an emergency room. All, that is, but the baby.
Carla Hall’s rant extends in many directions. She’s peeved that Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, would tell the New York Times, “I just think the ‘pro-choice’ language doesn’t really resonate, particularly with a lot of young women voters.” That’s the banner that a lot of the pro-abortion feminists have carried high for a long, long time.
Hall is also worried that substituting (“fuzzing up”) different catch phrases “to attract supporters who say their main issue is not abortion rights — or that they’re not concerned at all about abortion rights” is dangerous business.
“Reproductive health” rights or other more “encompassing” terms threaten to take the spotlight off of abortion which (however much advocates like Hall might pretend otherwise) is their be-all and end-all. Just as so many young women no longer call themselves “feminists” (which also sets Hall off), too many young women, in Hall’s worldview, are not fixated on abortion. They’ve been “lulled into a sense of security that that right is never going away.”
Hall’s conclusion sums up her concerns:
“So the advocates can say they’re not calling themselves pro-choice and the young women they poll can say they don’t like calling themselves pro-choice. But no one should think for a second that the advocacy to protect abortion rights is no longer a priority.”
But “pro-choice” could only work when the victim of that “choice”—the unborn child–was essentially invisible. It is just the opposite today when news stories and ultrasounds and YouTube videos and advertisements shout out the same life-affirming message: we have a young human being growing and learning by the day.
Ironically, a British pro-abortionist sees all of the items that (rightly) worry American abortion advocates as evidence that pro-lifers are losing! We’ll talk about that bizarre conclusion in a post later today.
