Safe, Legal, and Stigmatized

BARNES, FRED

Safe, Legal, and Stigmatized The unsung accomplishment of the pro-life movement. BY FRED BARNES A STIGMA. THAT'S THE GREAT achievement of the pro-life movement: Having an abortion once again...

...The prospect of either of those outcomes happening is nil at the moment...
...THAT'S THE GREAT achievement of the pro-life movement: Having an abortion once again carries a stigma...
...It's taken years—plus this small but real cultural shift—but Republicans finally understand that opposing abortion often helps them politically...
...Their goal is to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would let each state decide its own abortion law, or to ban abortion outFred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...In a Fox poll on Election Day in Missouri, 17 percent of voters said abortion was the issue that mattered most...
...Senator John Edwards of North Carolina told a NARAL gathering last week that "the important thing" about a woman "wrestling with a decision" is that "she and she alone has the right to make her choice...
...We just couldn't see it until the culture actually began changing...
...With their lockstep allegiance to pro-choice groups and feminists, Democrats are in a corner on abortion...
...Bush notably didn't mention overturning Roe v. Wade when he spoke by phone to the pro-life rally in Washington on January 22...
...Focus groups have found them to be surprisingly tilted against abortion...
...This is why Faye Wattleton, the former head of Planned Parenthood and now president of the Center for Gender Equality, finds it "disturbing" that women are becoming more conservative and religious...
...Attorney General John Ashcroft has said Roe v. Wade is settled law, but he's wrong too...
...Another factor is the explosion of crisis pregnancy centers across the country...
...More important is the fact that a growing percentage of women who've become pregnant reject abortion and have the baby...
...In the Minnesota Senate race, 14 percent said abortion was their paramount issue, and 81 percent of them voted for Republican Norm Coleman, who beat former Vice President Walter Mondale, a strong backer of the right to an abortion...
...The loudest pro-choicer was Gov...
...For now, the abortion issue is right where Republicans want it...
...Pro-lifers, including me, have always been suspicious of politicians who balked at concentrating on the banning of abortion, arguing the culture must change first...
...They're leery of all the popular restrictions: on partial-birth abortion, late-term abortion, parental consent, informed consent...
...The most telling shift, though, is not in public opinion but in the actions of pregnant women...
...It took years because Lee Atwa-ter, President Bush senior's political adviser, had sold the party on the notion that whenever the abortion issue is on the table in any form it hurts Republicans...
...The change is especially evident among young people...
...right by constitutional amendment...
...The legal right to an abortion is one that almost no one boasts of exercising...
...Instead, there's a new consensus in favor of sharp restrictions on abortion...
...Maybe that has something to do with it...
...He quickly built up a group of financial supporters, hired a director and a small staff, and now takes care of dozens of women...
...The National Abortion Rights Action League has changed its name to the less explicit NARAL Pro-Choice America...
...Her choice of what...
...President Bush is pushing this year to enact a ban on partial-birth abortion and on human cloning of any sort...
...Eighty percent of them voted for Republican Jim Talent, who defeated Democratic senator Jean Carnahan...
...Abortion is a medical procedure that fewer and fewer doctors and hospitals want to perform and not many medical schools want to teach...
...That would only complicate the politics of abortion and give Democrats something to rage about...
...This is why Kate Michelman of NARAL looks perpetually stressed...
...It means more of them support these restrictions...
...He didn't say...
...He's said as much before, but why repeat that now...
...Howard Dean of Vermont, who seemed to regard adoption and abortion as morally equivalent alternatives...
...And politicians, particularly Democrats, talk about "a woman's right to choose" without saying what the choice involves...
...They take in pregnant women, discourage them from having abortions, and care for them through childbirth and afterwards...
...And he didn't mention it...
...The baby is partly outside the mother's womb when this procedure takes place (the baby's brain is sucked out and its head crushed...
...He has an excellent shot at winning the first, a better than even chance on the second...
...Only one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who appeared before a NARAL audience last week opposes partial-birth abortion—Richard Gephardt...
...Imagine what Michelman and Wattleton must think when they see crisis pregnancy centers popping up everywhere and advertising in the Yellow Pages...
...Before an audience of average voters, Democrat or Republican, he wouldn't have fared so well...
...The latest count of such centers is more than 3,000, but that's probably low...
...There, the stigma would apply...
...People start them with little money and a few volunteers...
...Backers of legalized abortion say the decline in the number of abortions from 1.6 million to 1.3 million a year is due to greater use of contraceptives...
...That pleased the NARAL crowd, and none of his Democratic rivals called him on it...
...I once asked GOP senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania why the partial-birth issue was so significant in turning the debate on abortion...
...But it turns out the queasy pols may have had it right...
...You can see the baby," he said...
...This represents a cultural shift, a small one perhaps, but indicative of the stigma now attached to abortion...
...The Atwater axiom was notably untrue in senate races last fall...
...A poll of college freshmen in 1996 found that only half backed efforts to keep abortion legal, down from 65 percent in 1990...
...Pro-lifers are winning, but very gradually and incrementally, and they're not winning what they had hoped to...
...A friend of mine, Jim Wright, who works in commercial real estate in Falls Church, Virginia, opened one called Birthmothers a few years ago...
...Those who claim there's a pro-abortion consensus in America are wrong...
...Even the word "abortion" is rarely spoken by its advocates nowadays...

Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 20


 
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