By Dave Andrusko

Before I get into the substance of a Sunday New York Times editorial— “Where Abortion Rights Are Disappearing”—let’s take one second to contemplate the first two sentences in the piece written by Dorothy Samuels:

“Thirty-eight years after Roe v. Wade recognized a woman’s right to make her own childbearing decisions and legalized abortion nationwide, a newly intensified drive by anti-abortion forces who refuse to accept the law of the land has seriously imperiled women’s ability to exercise that right.”

Had abortion advocates “accepted the law of the land,” there would have been no offensive in the 1960s to repeal protective statutes some of which went back a hundred years, and no legal campaign that culminated in the 1973 Roe decision. Legal protection was enacted, dismantled, and now we are in the business of re-erecting a legal bulwark. Turnabout is fair play.

Likewise Samuels’ second sentence which simultaneously celebrates that “opponents of abortion rights” can’t outright ban abortion “at least in the near future,” and bemoans that pro-lifers are passing a welter of laws in the states in the interim.

But what was the genius of the Civil Rights Movement if not gradualism? Take what you can get, establish the foundation for the next step, and all the while educate the public. What we are doing is in the mainstream of social reform movements of which the Right to Life Movement is today’s preeminent example.

There are nice visuals—horrific, from the pro-abortion perspective. One shows an amping of the successful effort to pass pro-life laws. The other shows “A look at five of the most harmful restrictions.” In this second visual the states are color-coded based on how many of these “harmful restrictions” they have on the books.

But consider what they are: waiting periods/women’s right to know laws; parental involvement laws; laws to regulate abortion clinics like hospitals; and laws that take advantage of a provision in ObamaCare that allows States to affirmatively prohibit coverage of abortions under the qualified health plans offered through the health insurance exchanges that will be required by 2014. Far from onerous or at odds with public opinion, these are bedrock limitations that a majority Americans accept, in many cases a very large majority.

We would expect a pro-abortionist would go to DEFCON Four over any “limitation.” But what Samuels and her colleagues fear most, I suspect, is that the public will see that the sky doesn’t fall following passage. They will be more receptive to additional protective laws, including measures that rule about an abortion for children capable of experiencing pain, to name just one.

She is quite right to write that we DO portray “abortion as outside the mainstream.” Why would pro-abortionists be trying everything imaginable to force physicians to participate if abortion were mainstream?

But it is rank demagoguery to state that it is a part of our “powerful strategy” to “cast women who have abortions as immoral outliers.”

Samuels is free to load her discussion with as much pro-abortion jargon as she wishes. But it is the Right to Life Movement that has from its very beginning been there for women—to help them avoid the trauma so often associated with aborting their child and to offer them a shoulder to cry on if they make that tragic decision.

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