NRL News
202.626.8824
dadandrusk@aol.com

What are the components of pro-abortion apologetics 1001?

Nov 6, 2020

By Dave Andrusko

Editor’s note. Today’s look back at what appeared in NRL News Today exactly one year ago today takes a sharp look not just at the verbal gymnastics and rhetorical sleight of hand which is the pro-abortionist’s stock-and-trade but more specifically at how they use this to routinely distort pro-life legislation.

Pro-abortionists defend the destruction of unborn children—early in pregnancy or at the end of pregnancy, it makes no difference– in season and out. Thus there is no piece of pro-life legislation that they won’t ferociously attack. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.

Nonetheless, if you really want to get their dander up, propose legislation that public opinion polls show the citizenry widely approves. This makes their usual task of distortion and misrepresentation all the harder, and it annoys them.

I thought of this as I re-read something I have tucked away on my hard drive. It was an op-ed taking a sledgehammer to pro-life legislation in Ohio, written by Alicia Gibson, who at that juncture was the chair of Parents and Professionals of Planned Parenthood Cincinnati.

The photo (and I am not kidding) that accompanied her piece in the Cincinnati Enquirer is of a smiling Gibson holding a little baby playing with Gibson’s necklace.

No hint there that one in eight women who enter a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic gets an abortion.

Gibson attacks what she calls the”inch by inch approach to abortion legislation”; pro-lifers call this the “incremental approach.” 

Let’s dig into this for a moment.

From parental notification to informed consent laws to waiting periods to requirements that (largely) itinerant abortionists have admitting privileges at a local hospital to laws that say, hey, it’s wrong to submit living pain-capable unborn children to the horror of being torn to shreds–all are “sustained attacks” on “a woman’s constitutionally protected right to an abortion.”

I understand that these laws potentially have a real impact on Planned Parenthood’s $1.6 billion+ bottom line. So those who speak for PPFA are going to holler to high heaven (so to speak) at anything that threatens their cash flow. Naturally, this more mercenary motivation is dressed up in the usual abortion-speak about “concern for women.”

But there is another component that you come across in pro-abortion apologetics 1001.

When pro-lifers use the incremental approach—bunt, hit behind the runner– pro-abortionists are incensed. When we go for what pro-abortionists would consider a home run (to continue the baseball metaphor), they are incensed. In either case, we are dismissed as radicals, extremists, and out-of-the-mainstream whackos.

The implication is not just that pro-lifers are untrustworthy, which pro-abortionists must both believe and use as an assault weapon. Rather, it is that the public is unaware of the real meaning of such laws. If they did, they’d be up in arms.

In fact, the exact opposite is true. Consider….

If you believe, as pro-abortion ideologues must believe, that the public is in their corner, the only explanation when pro-life laws pass is subterfuge. 

But if you understand, as pro-lifers do, that there is a litany of laws that the public supports—or will come to support in the process of explaining the legislation—then it is absolutely no surprise when these laws pass. Why not? That’s where public opinion is already at or coming to.

That also includes laws to ban the abortion of pain-capable unborn children. Killing these babies is abhorrent even to many people who are “pro-choice.” Which is why the hysteria level by the abortion lobby reaches new heights when such laws are proposed, let alone when they are passed.

Gibson can lament that the state of Ohio was then, is now thoroughly pro-life and that the legislature’s and the governor’s actions reflect that.

The rest of us can celebrate that the incremental approach is winning sometimes inch by inch but also sometimes yard by yard.

Categories: pro-abortion
Tags: