By Dave Andrusko
Let’s see. Why would a pro-choice reporter/columnist, with a direct pipeline to the hierarchy of the pro-abortion movement, write a column under the headline, “ How the pro-life movement is winning — even with Obama in office”?
Or, perhaps a better question, how could Sarah Kliff ‘splain’ it all away?
Let’s take some of her more unimaginative explanations. When one side–in this case ours–gets bludgeoned by the election (and re-election) of an outspokenly pro-abortion president, it’s good for motivating the troops. The converse is that whichever side is winning, it loses interest. Kliff calls it the “a paradox of having an ally in the White House.”
But after more than three decades in the trenches, the Pro-Life Movement could have lost impetus, motivation, and heart when Barack Obama entered the White House–and especially a second time. Those were discouraging years.
In fact, our Movement rallied. Refusing to succumb to despair, over Obama’s time in office we have attained majorities in many, many state legislatures, elected a ton of pro-life governors, and (now) have pro-life leadership in control of both Houses of Congress.
Likewise, while fundraising may (or may not) have declined for the pro-abortion movement, that never had any effect on their pressure on Obama to give it everything it wanted–from pro-abortion Supreme Court justices, to abortion-enhancing provisions of ObamaCare, to routinely threatening to veto any pro-life legislation, and much, much more.
Of course they didn’t need to argue very long or hard. Obama and the Abortion Establishment are like two peas in a pod.
Kliff argues that the passage of ObamaCare (by one vote and courtesy of the President’s deviousness) energized opponents. She calls it “a clear catalyst behind the pro-life movement’s newfound mobilization.”
Really? Bear in mind in the same article Kliff notes
States passed a record 205 abortion restrictions between 2011 and 2013, more than the entire 30 years prior. …These changes are a clear result of pro-life mobilization in the Obama era.
Obviously m ost of those limitations had little or nothing to do with ObamaCare, which is clear as Kliff goes on to talk about laws that she says “more stringently regulate providers.” She references only the requirement that abortionists have admitting privileges at a local hospital, but there are many, many protective measures.
Those include requiring that abortion clinics upgrade to meet the requirements of an ambulatory surgical center, the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, making sure that abortionists are present when abortifacients are distributed to women, and provisions that give women a breathing space between the time she meets with the abortionist and the scheduled abortion, to name a handful.
Just speculating, but I suspect the objective of the piece is to reassure pro-abortionists that this, too, shall pass.
In this case, the “this” is the impact of the videos from the Center for Medical Progress which show Planned Parenthood officials and representatives of various “tissue procurement organizations” (TPOs) discussing the dissection, packaging, and sale of intact baby body parts in the most ghoulish manner imaginable.
Pro-abortionists will rally to PPFA’s defense, everyone will see what a wonderful organization Planned Parenthood is, and, presto chango, we’re back to the good old days when PPFA was riding high.
However this is to radically–and I do mean radically–misunderstand the differences between the current firestorm and previous congressional critiques of the nation’s largest abortion providers in the past.
This time we actually see, with our own eyes and hear with our own ears PPFA officials talking about unborn babies as if they were so much meat to be taken from the slaughterhouse, frozen and packaged, and then transported by a TPO to (usually) an academic institution where researchers will experiment on their hearts and lungs and brains and livers and kidneys.
Naw, it’s not the same-old, same-old. PPFA is under a microscope and the behavior it has been able to keep under wraps for decades is coming out from the dark and into the light.