By Alexandra DeSanctis
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
The Republican convention featured a speech attacking unlimited
legal abortion, while last week Democrats ignored the issue entirely.
The Republican convention yesterday evening featured a
speech by Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who today
is a pro-life activist.
The substance of Johnson’s speech has received markedly
little coverage, as most reports instead attacked the credibility of her
conversion story or dredged up her controversial comments on other subjects.
But what Johnson said about abortion is worth remembering.
“For most people who are pro-life, abortion is abstract.
They can’t even conceive of the barbarity,” she said, after telling the story
of assisting with an abortion procedure while working at Planned Parenthood.
“They don’t know about the ‘products of conception’ room in abortion clinics,
where infant corpses are pieced back together to ensure nothing remains in the
mothers’ wombs, or that we joked and called it the ‘pieces of children’ room.
For me, abortion is real. I know what it sounds like. I know what abortion
smells like. Did you know abortion even had a smell?”
This message is a powerful one, especially at a time when
supporters of legal abortion prefer to avoid talking about the procedure at
all. In fact, at last week’s Democratic convention, as the party ratified its
most pro-abortion platform in history, not a single speaker so much as said the
word “abortion.”
It was a striking omission for a party that now favors
unlimited, taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, that has nominated a
presidential candidate who promises to appoint only judges who embrace legal
abortion and a vice-presidential candidate who wants to use Congress and the
executive branch to block states from enacting pro-life laws even after fetal
viability.
It perhaps isn’t too surprising that Democrats would
rather avoid the subject entirely than admit to this extremism. In an opinion
piece this morning attacking Johnson’s remarks, New York Times
editorial-board member Lauren Kelley suggested that the Democrats’ evasion was
a smart, strategic decision:
No doubt the Democrats’ calculus
went something like this: Come across as the sane, rational party ahead of the
election. That’s the opposite of how President Trump has characterized the
party, as supporters of “ripping babies straight from the mother’s womb.” (No,
that is not a thing.)
Democrats surely looked at poll
numbers that show that abortion and contraception policies are pretty far down
the list of issues voters say they care most about heading into November, even
if those numbers are significantly higher for registered Democrats. The nation
is, after all, in the middle of a global pandemic, an ongoing climate crisis
and a major economic downturn.
But surely the poll numbers Kelley cites aren’t the only
ones Democrats have taken into consideration. Perhaps they’ve noticed, too,
that just 13 percent of the American public and 18 percent of self-identified
Democrats support legal abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, as
the party does. Perhaps they’ve discovered that nearly 80 percent of the public
opposes taxpayer-funded abortion, and three-quarters of Democrats oppose U.S.
funding of abortion overseas, both policies that the Biden–Harris ticket backs.
The Democratic convention tried to hide the party’s
position on abortion for one very obvious reason: It is out of step not only
with the American public, but with the party’s own voters.
Contra Kelley’s rather uninformed claim that Johnson
aimed to court white women voters by vowing that Trump’s second term will see Roe
v. Wade overturned, the real reason Republicans talk about abortion is
because the bare truth of the issue is the most powerful argument for the
pro-life cause. That is why President Trump tends to talk about late-term
abortion in graphic terms, much to the consternation of Kelley and other media
flaks who want the procedure to remain legal.
The Democratic Party backs legal abortion on demand, past
fetal viability, until the moment of birth, with no restrictions, and to the exclusion
of any pro-life laws in a single state. To discuss this platform, to discuss
abortion at all, would be to risk reminding voters of an inconvenient truth:
Every abortion ends the life of a distinct, living human being.
That was the power, and the threat, of Abby Johnson’s
speech. It reminded anyone listening that abortion is not an abstract concept.
Ultimately, abortion is not, as Democrats insist, an issue of the “right to
choose” or “women’s rights” or “reproductive justice.” Abortion is a matter of
life or death, and of whether the U.S. will continue to be a country that
favors giving power to the strong so that they may dominate the weak.
No comments:
Post a Comment