By Dave Andrusko
You would think—wouldn’t you?—with a dyed-in-the-wool abortion proponent newly re-elected to a second term as President, pro-abortionists and their many, MANY friends in the media would hardly be able to contain their joy or hide their feelings of dismissive condescension. In fact, as NRL News Today has written about extensively, almost the exact opposite is the case.
So, what’s the scoop? Why do we continue to encounter headlines such as “Roe at 40: ‘It’s never been this frightening before’” over a story in today’s Washington Post?
For the same reason Planned Parenthood is attempting an image makeover: the foundation is crumbling. (See “’Pro-Choice’ Passé? Much more than that behind PPFA’s shift in language”)
The irony in this particular story is a kind of throwaway line which is in direct contradiction to the flow of the story. Using the long time director of a long-established abortion clinic in Pittsburgh and the leader of a Pennsylvania pro-life group as representative figures, Kliff writes, “[C]ombatants on both sides agree: They are dead-tired of the struggle over this clinic’s existence.”
But everything else in the story says something else: one side is dead tired—the people who abort babies at the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center. The other side takes strength from knowing that Pennsylvanians has passed many pro-life laws, some of which have made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and that pro-abortion strategists are absolutely correct when they warn that pro-lifers have not let up in their relentless campaign to pass protective laws across the country.
To be sure, in the beginning people on both sides whose activism goes back to the 1970s and 1980s probably did think the battle would be resolved long before we were days away from the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. That is why Claire Keyes, who for many years was the director of the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center, could tell Kliff, “When I came into the clinic for the first time [1978], the feeling that we had was this sense of giddiness.” Women, she added, “had gained the right to control their own destiny.”
But that was a long, long time–and the enactment of many hundreds of pro-life laws–ago. The tell-tale signs of flagging energy and loss of confidence crop up repeatedly in the story.
They are not able to replenish their ranks. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “Pennsylvania had 50 providers of abortion care in 2008, an 11 percent decrease since 2005.”
One abortionist, Robert Thompson, has worked at the Center for more than 30 years and “has performed about 50,000 [!] abortions.” Apropos Guttmacher’s figures, we learn, “He’s in his late 60s and isn’t sure who will take his place when he retires.”
[How could the same man who told Kliff, “I initially thought I would just provide abortions to women who really needed them“ wind up taking the lives of 50,000 unborn babies? In a tremendously revealing comment, Thompson says, “I realized soon that was a very naive way to think about this. All the women who showed up at the clinic, in some way, needed this. Who was I to be the arbiter?”]
Why is Keyes “fearful about the future of abortion rights — and the clinic”? Thompson cites a Pennsylvania law passed in 2011 (Senate Bill 732) which requires that the 22 freestanding abortion clinics meet the same safety standards as ambulatory surgical facilities. The new law includes unannounced inspections of abortion facilities—not exactly a radical proposal, by the way.
Pennsylvania is home to abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s infamous Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. It was rarely inspected and not at all after 1993. Thompson bemoans,
“Sometimes I think the regulations are what will actually get us, more than what we saw in the early years.”
According to Kliff, “With other clinics closing and the facility she spent three decades directing in jeopardy, Keyes now finds it difficult to find the optimism she has held for decades.” Why are they closing again? Because they might have to meet minimal standards of cleanliness and safety?
No wonder they are pessimistic. No longer free to operate like the Wild, Wild West. Where WILL it all end?
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