WASHINGTON, D.C., February 22, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice and a leading figure in the pro-abortion community, has advised the abortion movement to stop ignoring the humanity of the unborn child before the tidal wave of pro-life popularity washes away pro-abortion laws altogether.
In a Washington Post column Friday entitled “Abortion Rights are Under Attack – and Pro Choice Activists are in a Time Warp,” Kissling said that pro-choice arguments concerning a woman’s “privacy” are dangerously outdated.
“Abortion is a private decision, we say, and the state has no power over a woman’s body. Those arguments may have worked in the 1970s, but today, they are failing us, and focusing on them only risks all the gains we’ve made,” she wrote. “The ‘pro-choice’ brand has eroded considerably.”
The pro-abortion mindset, warned Kissling, is increasingly being seen as callously indifferent to the unborn child, in contrast with the pro-life culture. “We can no longer pretend the fetus is invisible,” she said. “We must end the fiction that an abortion at 26 weeks is no different from one at six weeks. The fetus is more visible than ever before, and the abortion-rights movement needs to accept its existence and its value.
“It may not have a right to life, and its value may not be equal to that of the pregnant woman, but ending the life of a fetus is not a morally insignificant event.”
Kissling said that popular opinion tends to recognize the obligation to protect an unborn baby more after it’s old enough to survive outside the womb, a fact that mainstream abortion supporters are ignoring at their peril. “Abortion is not merely a medical matter, and there is an unintended coarseness to claiming that it is,” she said.
An important part of the new strategy, she said, is not to be overambitious: “unfortunately we’re not going to regain the ground we have lost.” Therefore, pro-aborts should “firmly and clearly reject post-viability abortions except in extreme cases,” which Kissling said should include eugenic abortions of disabled children, or when the pregnancy “seriously threaten[s]” a woman’s health by exacerbating a “medical or psychological condition.”
Kissling exhorted her colleagues to relax their grip on total abortion-on-demand.
“Some of my colleagues in the abortion-rights movement will resist even this modest shift on post-first trimester abortions, fearing that any compromise reflects weakness,” she wrote. “If the choice movement does not change, control of policy on abortion will remain in the hands of those who want it criminalized.”
Kissling also called for regulating late-term abortions to ensure that there are adequate reasons for obtaining them, and advocated tighter regulation of abortion clinics. “We should also work to sensibly regulate abortion facilities – not to prohibit access, but to ensure safety.”
The abortion industry gained unwanted attention last month after Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell and several of his unlicensed employees were arrested and charged with the murder of a former client and several newborn children. Gosnell would reportedly cause the birth of post-viability unborn children, after which he would sever their spinal cords.
When police raided his facility they found a filthy scene of blood-stained floors, semi-conscious women moaning on dirty furniture, and the dismembered remains of unborn children cramming the downstairs freezer and other corners of the clinic.