If at the beginning we took all the time necessary to rebut the factual errors and unsubstantiated assertions associated with Sunday’s pro-abortion “March for Women’s Lives,” we’d run out space before we'd even begun to discuss the subject for today. Let me just say this: contrary to the lyrics of the sheet music off of which they are all singing, the vote to uphold Roe is not 5-4 but 6-3.
Ergo, Roe doesn’t “hang by one vote.” Two pro-Roe justices would need to be replaced by two who found its legal logic appalling and unsustainable.
But to return to the march/rally, which will take place in Washington, D.C., it’s supposed to gin up a Movement that is sputtering. Based on an article about the march that appears in this week’s Newsweek, there is, from the pro-abortion perspective, a trifecta of discouraging developments.
We learn that there is a “hostile administration in the White House,” while “control of the Supreme Court [is] up for grabs” this November, and pro-lifers have just passed two pieces of legislation. Isn’t that enough to warrant “sounding the alarm”?
But it goes beyond all that, as we discussed yesterday. The Abortion Establishment is very uneasy about the direction young people are taking. As if one cue, one of the volunteers working in D.C. conceded to Newsweek, “We're the first generation to be more pro-life than our parents."
If anyone is going to “sound the alarm,” who better than NARAL’s Kate Michelman. I suspect Michelman sees herself as a kind of Paul Revere figure, forever sallying forth to announce, “The Pro-Lifers [and the End] are Coming.”
In her interview with Newsweek’s Debra Rosenberg, Michelman was up to a verbal gallop before Rosenberg was able to turn on her tape recorder. “One of the purposes of this march is to excite a generation of women to mobilize on behalf of their right to choose, for themselves and their future but also for their daughters and their granddaughters,” she said.
Why the need to “excite” women, you might ask. “This younger generation of women doesn’t really believe they’re going to lose their right to choose,” Michelman complained, for the ten billionic time. “They don’t know what it was like not to have a right.”
Interestingly, the logo for the march is "Choice, justice, access, health, abortion, global family planning." The only thing missed is pari-mutual betting.
To her credit, Rosenberg says, “The official march logo refers to choice and justice and access and health and global family planning and oh, yeah, abortion is in there. There’s a lot going on. Is that a deliberate effort to broaden the appeal? Do you think it’s confusing?”
After Michelman offers a confusing 158-word-long answer, Rosenberg responds (again to her credit) with, “So that’s not to say that the abortion [issue] itself couldn’t draw a crowd on its own anymore?”
Michelman’s answer? “No, no, no. Not at all.” Well, maybe, maybe not.
Michelman is stepping down from NARAL (“NARAL is strong,” she says. “It can go on without Kate Michelman”) so that she can “bring all that I’ve done all of my life to bear on this presidential election, to work for John Kerry in any capacity that he thinks I could be of value to him.”
The leadership of the pro-abortion movement is inextricably interwoven with the national Democratic Party. Like white on rice, as a friend used to say.
And it’s no accident that Michelman should tell Newsweek that the efforts behind this march (which go back a year) are at least in part grassroots–“old-fashioned shoe-leather organizing strategies,” is the way she described one phase of the campaign. Attempting to co-opt the language of the Pro-Life Movement makes it sound as if they have much more support from regular Americans than they have, or will ever have.
But Newsweek also ran another story this week that talked about how grassroots, shoestring-budgeted pro-lifers are making the Planned Parenthood behemoth stand up and take notice. That, of course, is ultimately why we are able to pass the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act without massive resources or a sympathetic media. We have people working in every county in this nation to restore the right to life to unborn children, in season and out.
By contrast the Abortion Establishment is in possession of one of the world’s great Rolodexes. It can count on the support of a host of powerful organizations, ably supplemented by a press corps that most often sugarcoats its questions and gives pro-abortionists the benefit of every doubt.
While none of us are treating the march as if it isn’t important, all of us will be buried in hype about how the “sleeping pro-choice giant has been awakened.”
My guess is that, in truth, most of the people coming out of hibernation are those who heretofore had taken no position on abortion. They’ve been aroused by the ugly details of the incredible brutality of partial-birth abortion which have gradually worked their way into public consciousness.
Repulsed by the violence and cruelty, they will instinctively seek out and join those generous souls who are working night and day to bring abortion to an end. And that is you!
If at the beginning we took all the time necessary to rebut the factual errors and unsubstantiated assertions associated with Sunday’s pro-abortion “March for Women’s Lives,” we’d run out space before we'd even begun to discuss the subject for today. Let me just say this: contrary to the lyrics of the sheet music off of which they are all singing, the vote to uphold Roe is not 5-4 but 6-3.