AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS: Without Apology

...Moreover, this unapologetic stance, says Ehrenreich, must extend to all abortions, for whatever reason, no matter how crass...

...The pubic is not "persuaded that the pro-choice arguments we have been making answer the basic moral question of how one can support reproductive choice when one believes that bad choices are being made or that having the choice in itself leads to bad results...abortion is seen by many as a choice not worthy of human dignity, liberty and freedom because it results in the unnecessary death of an unborn child...

...Amy Richards, also appearing in the pages of the New York Times in July, wasn't shrinking from her abortions...

...Time to take your thumbs out of you mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights," she wrote...

...That's fine by her, even though she considers aborting fetuses "for deafness or dwarfism" as a "little sketchy...

...Writer Barbara Ehrenreich, pinch-hitting for Thomas Friedman on the New York Times op-ed page in July, explained the need for this new rhetoric of abortion without apologies...

...So he calls on pro-choicers to abandon their rhetorical skittishness, and make an overt "moral" case for killing unborn babies because they spoil the lives of women and undermine the welfare of children they do want...

...We are there to help women, and it's important to talk about abortion so that it's not a stigma..And now, the anti-abortion folks are stressing all this hard stuff about abortion—partial births, multi-dimensional sonograms—that makes the debate much more difficult...

...In my heart I will miss you but physically I don't have the means to take care of you and your older sister," it reads...

...T HE "PRO-CHOICE" MOVEMENT iS HOW "Beyond Choice," the title of a recent book by Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger...

...While it is the epitome of human destiny and the greatest potential joy that humanity can create, it is also a liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family...

...The website Imnotsorry.net allows women to post testimonials expressing their "relief" and "joy" after an abortion...

...We can no longer respond to that with `it's your right to choose'...We need to recapture the notion that abortion is a difficult moral choice for women, but one that is, in fact, a moral choice...

...Sanger's book left the Washington Post's reviewer Liza Mundy a little queasy...

...Unable to fool Americans with "pro-choice" euphemisms, abortion advocates are turning to a more direct strategy: outright pro-abortion pride...

...What's not acceptable to her is that some women "are in denial about aborting 'defective' fetuses," viewing themselves as morally superior to women (like Ehrenreich) who chose abortion for lifestyle reasons...

...The strategy is designed to normalize abortion, render it commonplace through casual talk, "de-mystify and de-stigmatize it," as one Planned Parenthood official said to a reporter after the group's "I had an abortion" T-shirts went on sale...

...I will never label you a mistake, because God obviously thought you should have been here, even though I beg to differ...

...Toward this end, reports the Post-Gazette, women at the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center are now writing imaginary notes to their aborted children, explaining to them why death was good for them...

...You can blame a lot of folks, from media bigwigs to bishops, if we lose our reproductive rights, but it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me," she writes...

...This brutal frankness, however, necessitates new lies, such as Alexander Sanger's description of the unborn child as an intruder who deserves death: "The unborn child is not just an innocent life...

...In order to survive, humanity has necessarily taken pre-born life to preserve other life all throughout its evolutionary history...

...The work we're doing is good...

...I wanted the baby...

...To both women, Ehrenreich says, "...unless I'm missing something, you didn't want your babies either...

...The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away...

...I didn't let your dad know about you, simply because I'm ashamed...

...The site, explain its founders, "was created for the purpose of showing women that exercising their legal right to terminate their pregnancy is not the blood-splattered guilt trip so many make it out to be...

...I am not sure, though, it's going to work as a general philosophy...

...I can't believe we're about to make two disappear...

...Now it is the rallying cry of their opponents who are happy to say, "I had an abortion...

...The idea that 'some babies must die so that others might live' hardly seems likely to galvanize a new activist generation...

...Ron Fitzimmons, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette earlier this year that "We have nothing to hide...

...George Neumayr is managing editor of The American Spectator...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2004 She, for example, reports that "many couples (no hard numbers exist) are deciding to abort their imperfect fetuses...

...Implicit in Ehrenreich's argument is that women betray through their guilt that abortion is unjust, and therefore invite the political order to stop it...

...But abortion advocates intend to try anyway...

...One might think a movement this comically crude had been infiltrated by pro-life satirists...

...They must abandon their guilt and train society to see abortion as an unambiguous good so that the movement isn't discredited...

...The movement argues, more openly than ever, for killing unborn children with a clean conscience...

...Richards casually revealed that she aborted two of her triplets because she didn't want to "have to move to Staten Island" and GEORGE NE YR "start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise...

...In a column titled "Owning Up to Abortion," she reported her own, "I had two abortions during my all-too fertile-years," as she argued that unless women replace their guilt with unblinking endorsement, abortion rights will erode...

...Certainly, his is a bold attempt to forge a genuine new argument, one that's true to his grandmother's reasoning but adjusted to the present day," she writes...

...Ehrenreich writes of a woman who aborted a defective fetus and then said of the experience, "I resented the fact that I had to be there with all these girls that did not want their babies," and another woman who aborted her Down-syndrome child and said, "I don't look at it as though I had an abortion....There's a difference...

...Mundy noted that "abortion rights advocates need a new rationale, a fresh and persuasive argument," but Sanger's attempt to reason so "coldbloodedly" isn't likely to provide it...

...A T-shirt Planned Parenthood tried to hawk online in July reads, "I had an abortion...

...Sanger admits that "pro-choice" rhetoric has failed...

...One note shaped in the size of a heart is signed "Mom...

...Richards says she "asked the doctor: `Is it possible to get rid of one of them...

...Abortion Kills Children" was once a placard at pro-life marches...

...SEPTEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41 Women at Allegheny Reproductive Health Center are now writing imaginary notes to their aborted children, explaining to them why death was good for them...

...Or two of them?'" Her boyfriend Peter stared at the "sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats...

...She displayed a pro-abortion directness even Ehrenreich couldn't surpass...

...The prejudice is widespread that a termination for medical reasons is somehow on a higher moral plane than a run-of-the-mill abortion...But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular 'defective' fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis...