January 6, 2016 (UnmaskingChoice) — Sick of hearing bad news all the time? Well, then enjoy what the abortion activists over at Slate.com consider to be bad news: The pro-life movement was so successful in 2015 that their silver lining is a desperate hope that the pro-life movement has made so much progress, Americans will now start to turn against them.
For example, mourns columnist Michelle Goldberg:
The past year might have been the worst for abortion rights in America since Roe v. Wade was decided 42 years ago. This was the year that David Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress infiltrated Planned Parenthood and turned shop talk about fetal tissue into a propaganda coup, leading to five separate congressional investigations. Support for abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest became the normative position among Republican presidential candidates.
The worst year for abortion rights since Roe v. Wade? Well, Happy New Year. A few notes, though—the reason that “shop talk” about “fetal tissue”—that’s what pro-choice people call baby heads and limbs and marketable cadavers—was such a propaganda coup is that we got to hear abortionists casually chuckle about burning babies on bonfires and eyeballs falling out of baby heads and other nightmarish scenarios. So regardless of Planned Parenthood’s protestations that “everything we did was legal”—when have we heard that before?—millions of people realized, with shivers running down their spines, that abortionist shop talk sounds something like a working script for Saw IV: Reproductive Rights Run Amok.
As for the increasingly pro-life positions of most Republican presidential candidates, I must say I think the American pro-life movement deserves a pat on the back for that accomplishment. As much as I despise Donald Trump and as hollow as I think his new pro-life position is, the fact that he felt it was necessary to have his pro-life conversion on the road to DC does speak to pro-life influence in Republican politics.
Back to Goldberg:
“We are experiencing the culmination of a decades-long strategy by anti-choice extremists,” says Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. The far-right takeover of the GOP, a project that’s been underway for more than 40 years, is complete, meaning that a candidate like Marco Rubio can support forced childbirth for rape victims and still be seen as the mainstream alternative to his party’s conservative zealots. “Certainly in this presidential election, the rhetoric around women, around doctors who provide abortions, is worse than anything I’ve ever seen in mainstream politics,” says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood.
While I think my American conservative friends would chuckle painfully at the suggestion that conservatives have taken over the Republican Party, it’s nice to see that the abortion activists are so panicky. And by “forced childbirth,” Ms. Goldberg means that the child leaving the womb will do so in one piece and hopefully breathing, rather than in a macabre clump of shredded humanity that can be sold or disposed of as the attending abortionist sees fit. The child has to come out, one way or the other. The question pro-lifers and abortion activists disagree so strongly on is the child’s condition upon exiting.
And it is this reality that pro-life politicians have been working, with some success, to curb:
As the Republican Party has grown more extreme, it has expanded its reach in the states. 2015 was a milestone year for Republican control of state legislatures, with the party dominating both houses in 30 states, the highest number since at least 1978. Republicans used their electoral strength to pass 57 new state-level anti-abortion laws. Overall, there were more state anti-abortion laws passed in 2011 and 2013 than this year, but that’s partly because the most conservative states have already enacted so much of the anti-abortion movement’s wish list. “To some extent, they’re running out of things to do,” says Richards.
Oh, I don’t think so. If there’s one thing the pro-life movement doesn’t run out of, it is things to do. As long as Planned Parenthood exists to end the lives of human beings in the womb, the pro-life movement will exist to rob them of victims.
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Hopefully, Goldberg says, the onslaught of celebrities endorsing abortion will help to destigmatize the procedure. But with revelations such as those in the Center for Medical Progess videos circulating on social media platforms that the mainstream media, to their great chagrin, cannot control, it’s dubious that someone who heard about a baby having his brain harvested can be talked out of her disgust by the sultry voice of Scarlett Johansson. And it’s true, says Goldberg—there’s no telling when things could get better for abortion rights:
But when it comes to abortion, 2015 has been a lesson in how the once unthinkable becomes the new normal—and it’s happened with a Democrat in the White House. If a Republican wins the presidency next year, we will likely see 2015 as an entirely different sort of inflection point. Just because things are as bad as they’ve been in 40 years doesn’t mean they can’t get worse.
If that’s not a mission statement for 2016, I don’t know what is.
Reprinted with permission from CCBR.