Under the pressure of shifting popular opinion, cracks between
pro-abortion groups and the Democratic Party are widening. The
cracks became visible after John Kerry lost “values voters” to
George Bush, prompting prominent Democrats to begin their crawl
away from organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Kerry
and Hillary Clinton, among others, distanced themselves from the
party’s customary and straightforward enthusiasm for abortion on
demand. Hillary Clinton was so bewildered by Kerry’s defeat on
moral issues that she even started speaking of a rapprochement with
pro-lifers.
This drew gasps and head shaking from a group of pro-abortion
activists who listened to her shortly after the election instruct
them that “We can all recognize that abortion in many ways
represents a sad, even tragic, choice to many, many women.”
Abortion is a tragedy? This was not what the crowd wanted to hear.
After the speech, Martha Stahl, director of public relations and
marketing for Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood, disputed the
description of abortion as a tragedy, telling the New York
Times that “we see women express relief more than anything
else that they have the freedom to choose.”
Now the cracks are spreading more as the nomination of John
Roberts puts additional strain on skittish Democrats whose
pollsters are telling them that NARAL and Planned Parenthood make
them look like the evil party. NARAL’s decision to go for Roberts’
jugular in an ad depicting him as a cheerleader for abortion clinic
bombings has Democrats who used to pander to the group suddenly
willing to criticize it. Almost treating the group like the
left-wing equivalent of Operation Rescue, Democrats this week let
it be known that NARAL is “intemperate.”
“As a pro-choice person, I don’t like being placed on the
defensive by my leaders. NARAL should pull [the ad] and move on,”
said Frances Kissling, president of the sham group Catholics for a
Free Choice. Kissling was speaking to the New York Times,
which, sensing like the Democrats that popular opinion is cutting
against cultural liberalism, has taken upon itself the task of
policing the unseemly excesses of social liberals. NARAL’s ad
attacking Roberts had caused, sniffed the Times,
“considerable uneasiness” within “the larger liberal coalition of
which NARAL is a part.”
The privileged position NARAL and other pro-abortion groups
enjoyed after scalping Robert Bork has eroded considerably. The
Democrats have long been leery of the impolitic antics of these
groups but they didn’t object during the Bork confirmation because
their propaganda stunts were polling well.
In an interview last year, NARAL’s former president Kate
Michelman said that she “brought a pollster aboard in 1987 when
Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court and the larger civil
rights and progressive community was a little worried about the
abortion issue becoming a divisive one in the campaign to defeat
him. I had to effectively demonstrate that you can talk about the
right to choose in a way that brings people together — you could
demonstrate the threat that a Robert Bork poses to fundamental
rights by mobilizing around the right to privacy and the right to
choose as values. I had to prove that and I did.”
NARAL can’t make this case anymore. It is no coincidence that
DLC-style Democrats were openly critical of NARAL’s agitprop this
week just days after one of their favorite pollsters, Stanley
Greenberg, informed them that the party is alienating swing voters
on moral issues to the point that any advantage Democrats enjoy
over Republicans on economic issues is nullified. Greenberg (and
fellow pollster Karl Agne) had to tell the Democrats that the poor,
uneducated voters they once took for granted are on to them. “Most
referred to Democrats as ‘liberal’ on issues of morality, but some
even go so far as to label them ‘immoral,’ ‘morally bankrupt,’ or
even ‘anti-religious,’” according to Greenberg’s analysis quoted in
the Washington Post.
The controversy NARAL is trying to whip up would take the
Democrats deeper into the culture war Greenberg tells them that
they are losing. “As powerful as the concern over these issues is,”
say Greenberg and Agne in a patronizing nod to the true believers
of the party, “the introduction of cultural themes — specifically
gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family
unit and the role of religion in public life — quickly renders
them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the
national level.”
If the Bork nomination cemented pro-abortion power in the
Democratic Party, the Roberts nomination is hastening its
crack-up.
