Matt Bowman: “Abortion reduction” bait and switch
by Matt Bowman
Alliance Defense Fund Legal Counsel
When abortion supporters propose compromise, the compromise is always that they win and babies lose. So the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that “abortion foes” are shifting to a new strategy, to reduce abortion rather than to outlaw it.
The article is an exercise in wishful thinking. All of the supposedly pro-life people the Post identifies in this trend are “pro-life” mainly by self-identification. Most of them were never part of concerted efforts to provide equal rights for preborn children. Many are leftist Trojan-horse groups designed and funded to undermine the pro-life movement. And even the few who were once pro-life campaigned for a radical pro-abortion political agenda this year. So this turns out to be a non-story: people who are seeking to undermine the pro-life movement are “shifting” to a new strategy, one that seeks to undermine the pro-life movement. Surprise!
The actual pro-life movement has become galvanized by the recent elections. That movement, by definition, seeks equal rights for preborn children in fact and in law. They know that the election was lost because of the economy and the war, not because of an imagined new acceptance of abortion. And they are newly united to protect what legal gains they have secured, and to persist in stopping discrimination against the preborn. Traditional segments of the movement have become emboldened like never before, and groups who often disagree have a new common purpose in opposing the truly apocalyptic “Freedom of Choice Act.”
Ever since 1973, apologists for legal abortion have proposed the same “compromise”: keep abortion legal. The Supreme Court itself repeatedly declared, in Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases, that their solution (abortion on demand) is the ideal compromise, and everyone in society should just stop fighting about it. The core of their supposed solution is to continue to treat preborn children like garbage, but to claim to respect pro-life people, sort of. Not surprisingly, this compromise did not lead to a truce in the abortion wars.
The new compromise is more of the same, with one notable exception: it has new packaging. The old compromise failed in part because it came from people who admitted that they support abortion. This time around, they proposed the same thing but called themselves pro-life. They adopted names and titles identifying themselves as Christian, Catholic, or pro-life, and they drafted liberal Christians as well as a few individuals who were once pro-life but who, whatever they now believe, currently act in every way possible to prevent legal protection for preborn children. Some even admit to having abandoned the idea that abortion is murder and the preborn should be protected, and they even suggest that the choice to kill children is required by some warped concept of religious freedom.
Their strategy has been successful. With the economy looming large, many Christians were too quick to accept the benign mask donned by abortion extremists. In reality, studies show that legal restrictions significantly reduce abortion (and common sense confirms this). Meanwhile, the impact of increased government funding for pregnant women is unclear, and both political parties support it anyway. Yet many Christians overlooked these facts, in part because pro-life people have long been too trusting in what public officials say about themselves–merely claiming they are not for abortion–instead of scrutinizing what people will actually do about abortion. To paraphrase Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics: the pro-life movement really shouldn’t care what public officials believe. It should only judge what they will do, to stop or to increase the killing. Christians should be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
By a true standard, this new compromise is nothing of the sort. Here is the proposal: stop restricting abortion in law, and instead we will give government funding to low income pregnant women. It is unclear what the pro-abortion side gives up in this deal. The pro-life cause, on the other hand, not only abandons equal protection in law for preborn children, but also repeals legal obstacles to abortion: parental involvement, 24-hour-waiting periods, informed consent, and bans on taxpayer funding of abortion. As Law Prof. Rick Garnett points out on the Mirror of Justice Blog, the current version of compromise seems to include forcing pro-life health professionals to participate in abortion. All children in the womb can be dismembered up to the day of birth in this “compromise.”
Even “abortion reduction” is a bait-and-switch. These abortion supporters disdain pro-life Democrats’ “Pregnant Women Support Act,” which would actually fund pregnant women, and they oppose covering preborn children under SCHIP insurance. Instead, the same brand of allegedly pro-life congressmen put forward bills that will actually funnel money into Planned Parenthood, the biggest abortion business in the country, rather than just funding abortion alternatives for pregnant women as promised. Some compromise. Under the guise of abortion reduction, government money will fuel the abortion industry itself, including its effort to outlaw pro-life pregnancy centers that truly reduce abortion. Even to suggest such a deal proves that the people proposing it are not pro-life, whatever they call themselves.
This so-called compromise includes another twist of pro-abortion marketing: pro-life people must give up trying to “criminalize” abortion. This is merely a focus-group-tested talking point designed to demonize pro-life people as wanting to imprison women. In reality, abortion before Roe v Wade was never regulated by jailing women, and the pro-life movement does not propose it today, but instead cares for women as second victims of abortion (which itself could be the starting point for a true compromise). Yet, see how so-called pro-life moderates have slipped a hidden agenda into their rhetoric. They don’t limit their talk to not criminalizing women–they talk of giving up “criminalizing,” period. By which they mean, we should give up criminalizing abortionists, the butchers of mankind, who slaughter thousands of innocent, defenseless children and frequently abuse women in their killing centers. We should give up criminalizing a multi-million dollar industry that aborts women without informed consent, protects child molesters by hiding minors’ abortions from their parents, and targets racial minorities for depopulation. We should give up regulating abortion by law in any way whatsoever.
You never hear the leftist “pro-lifers” point out that they want to let mass-murdering abortionists freely roam the streets of America. It doesn’t fit their supposed pro-life image. But it is the “compromise” they propose. There truly is nothing new under the sun.