WASHINGTON — In a town rife with protests, I shouldn’t have
been surprised. The other day, as I was walking along the National
Mall, a bright yellow school bus pulled up with billboards of
butchered babies adorning both sides. I happened to glance up at
the driver, who decided I was looking for a confrontation.
“That’s right, keep walking sodomite!” he shouted at me over a
loudspeaker. “Ignore the truth. Ignore the babies’ cries. Your
flesh will rot away with the Godless judges, just before you all
burn in hell. How do you like that, sodomite?”
Well, in truth, I didn’t like it much at all. I’m not sure which
part I liked less: that, out of a crowd of 200, I was pegged as the
“sodomite” or that my eternal vacation was booked in a place much
too tropical for my taste. Yet I, too, am a foe of abortion, and a
serious one at that.
This sort of wild-eyed-preacher-on-PCP routine is atypical, but
it is precisely the kind of image that the pro-life movement has
been trying to shrug off for the last 30 years. Fire and brimstone
appeals to a much too narrow segment of the population, and is all
too easily dismissed as a supernatural rather than a reasoned
argument. As William Saletan points out in his fine book, Bearing
Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, the
pro-abortion movement made similar strategic mistakes early on,
advocating stances unpopular with the public, such as state funding
of abortions, before realizing only a coalition would bring victory
at the ballot box.
To this end, they pushed controversial groups such as NOW and
the ACLU to the sidelines and began courting anti-government voters
(a broad and ever-growing constituency) by recasting the abortion
debate into a question of government intrusion in people’s lives.
Meanwhile, some in the pro-life movement have proved all too
willing to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Witness the
condemnations of President Bush for his stance on stem cell
research, which, while allowing some research on existing cell
lines, insured that no more government funds would go to create
embryos for research purposes.
That said, this weekend’s pro-life conference hosted by The American Cause was
definitely a step in the right direction. Aside from a few wild
card panelists, (including one who said that Planned Parenthood
centers are churches for pro-abortionists where babies are
“sacrificed to Satan”), the conference was quite the forward
looking affair. New ideas strategies were discussed with an
admirable and undogmatic frankness that might have shocked
outsiders.
Chief among these was the inclusion of women recounting the
terrible fallout of their own abortions. The emotionally charged
atmosphere sent many attendees into tears. Try maintaining your
composure while a young woman describes Planned Parenthood staff
advising her as a 16-year-old seeking an abortion (sans her
parents’ consent) to keep her crying down as she received
the injection that would still the beating heart of her child.
“Is it a baby?” she asked the Planned Parenthood counselor, who,
notably, refused to allow her to see the sonogram confirming her
pregnancy. “No, it’s just a clump of cells,” she was told. “They
tell you that, but they don’t tell you what it’s like to have to
abort your baby at home, alone,” she said.
Most abortion is not murder; it’s negligent homicide. Murder
requires premeditation and an understanding that one is terminating
a life. The trend in our society has clearly been toward getting
over our “love affair with the fetus,” as former Surgeon General
Joycelyn Elders so eloquently put it.
It is only much later, when the gravity and horror of the
operation hits home, that the grief and penance come into play.
Yet, the condemnation wing of the pro-life movement continues to
frighten these women — arguably its most valuable asset — away.
Combine their testimony with the technology that can pick up the
first smiles in the womb, ever closer to the point of conception,
and the entire debate shifts.
Allan Parker of the Texas Justice
Foundation, another panelist, understands this. The TJF has
embraced these women, an action which may sow the seeds of future
pro-life victories. Parker is representing both Norma McCorvey (Roe
of Roe v. Wade) and Sandra Cano (Doe of Doe v.
Bolton), who both now seek to overturn the court decisions
that ushered in abortion on demand.
Parker argues that abortion has done more harm to women than
good, whatever the proclamations of the unborn’s ultimate
fair-weather friend Justice Sandra Day O’Connor may be. To this end
he has collected over 5,000 pages of depositions from women whose
lives have been damaged by abortions.
Which is good, because the pro-abortion movement floundered
until it embraced a vocabulary of individual rights. Indeed, Judge
Robert Bork described the ripple effects of abortion as “the end
result of radical individualism.”
However, individualism can cut both ways. In fact, a radical
notion of individualism today might recognize the worth of the
person growing inside of a woman as at least as important as what
that woman wants to do to it. “The death of a single man is a
tragedy,” Stalin once said. “The death of a million a statistic.”
By focusing on that tragedy, pro-lifers may be able to move the
debate beyond the number crunching.
