By Dave Andrusko
Hard as it is for me to believe, the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is only nine days away. Over the last couple of days there’s been a number of “where are we at now” pieces, which will no doubt pick up speed over the weekend. Let me offer a couple of preliminary thoughts today, and next week I (and others here at National Right to Life) will add further perspective on a hideous decision that continues to wreak havoc nearly four decades and 54 million dead babies later.
Let’s take a story from NPR: “Abortion Rights Advocates, Opponents’ Tactics Evolve.” Two points made by health correspondent Julie Rovner on the NPR program, “Talk of the Nation” are particularly intriguing.
First, she is not so foolish (nor is the host, Neal Conan) to be sidetracked by the simple truth that not every pro-life initiative passed. As Conan said of one measure that failed, “doesn’t that sort of obscure the rest of what’s going on?” Rovner quickly responded, “Yes, very much so.”
And by “rest” he/she means all the laws that passed, characterized not only by number but also by the creative ways these measures are intended to hem in the abortion “right.” (Those included funding bans, sonogram laws, and informed consent laws, to name just three.) As Rovner put it, “I think the 2010 elections, which swept in an awful lot of Republicans, not just in Congress but also in the state legislatures, really prompted an enormous amount of legislation at the state level.”
Second, Rovner alludes to, but never mentions the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Now the law of five states, this protects from abortion unborn children capable of feeling pain.
Speaking of which, Rovner says,
“One of the interesting things, though, is that with a lot of these laws that you would think, you know, these, sort of, incremental chipping away at abortion rights that you would think would go straight to court, a lot of the sort of the abortion rights groups have been afraid to take some of these to court because they’re afraid that the court would uphold them.
Yes, pro-abortion groups ARE afraid. As Mary Spaulding Balch, NRLC’s Director of State Legislation, said on Pro-Life Perspective, “They are afraid of the issue of fetal pain.”
But perhaps the most interesting commentary came from Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, in response to Conan’s question, “And is it unfair to characterize the wind as being in the sails of the other side?”
Northrup reached into her box of recycled rhetoric, yammering about how common abortion is, how we don’t ‘trust’ women, how we don’t want to go back to the days of the government telling us what to do, etc., etc., etc.
As I say we’ll talk about this at length next week. Be sure to participate in your local area’s pro-life events commemorating Roe v. Wade.
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