It's no news to the very sharp, very perceptive people who read that it is simply amazing how much you can learn by reading the other side or their legions of sympathetic journalists who use news articles and online essays as a way of offering [semi-]disguised advice on strategy.
To take one of many examples there is an extraordinary piece that appeared at www.slate.com February 5 written by Liza Mundy. (Ms. Mundy is described as "the recipient of a Kaiser Media Fellowship in Health to report on ethics and reproductive technology." I assume she is the same Liza Mundy who used to write for the Washington Post.)
The piece begins as a thinly-disguised assault on the President's Council on Bioethics (described in the piece as the "Kass Commission," after its chairman Leon Kass) which has done some good work and--from the pro-abortion set's perspective--threatens to do more.
Mundy describes the "pro-choicers'" fear: that the Kass commission "intends to use [an upcoming] IVF [in vitro fertilization] report as part of a back-door anti-abortion mission, further eroding abortion rights by granting the embryo enhanced moral standing." But then, without warning, Mundy abruptly takes the reader in a different direction: "But privately, what has pro-choicers unnerved is their own failure to face up to the issues posed by the profitable and ever-growing field of high-tech baby-making."
What's intriguing for us is what Mundy describes as the "internal tensions" within "pro-choice" groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Let me offer a lengthy quote that puts the dilemma in a nutshell:
"Some of these [internal tensions] came to light last summer, when a Newsweek article on the 'fetal rights' movement pointed out that the latest reproductive technologies--providing, as they do, the ability to see embryos sooner and cultivating, as they do, an atmosphere in which pregnant women happily scrapbook those early ultrasounds--have created a real image problem for the pro-choice movement.
As Kirsten Moore, the president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, put it, the piece 'kind of prompted us to realize, oh my God, our movement's messages suck.'"
That is what a member of the pro-abortion inner sanctum is saying: our spiel is hopelessly out of date.
Consider this in light of yesterday's discussion of the corner into which pro-abortionists have painted themselves by staunchly opposing Unborn Victims of Violence laws (formerly called "fetal homicide" laws).
They do so even when public opinion polls consistently show that most self-identified "pro-choicers" understand that when a pregnant woman is assaulted and her baby is injured or killed, there are two victims.
According to Ms. Mundy, the "reproductive-rights community" has held "a series of quiet conversations" to address the disconnect between their abortion-now-and-forever rhetoric and the fact that "a woman desperately hoping for a positive pregnancy test has a whole new attitude toward the embryo.
'Women in their 20s and 30s are probably more worried that their eggs are going to age than whether they're going to be able to obtain an abortion,' Moore acknowledges."
We learn that consultants were then called in. They "urged abortion rights groups to 'reframe the debate' and 'take back' words like 'baby' and 'mother.'"
Just how seriously the "reproductive-rights community" takes all this is shown in this quote from Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist from the University of Pennsylvania.
Wolpe told Mundy, "Unless Planned Parenthood can grapple with the bioethical issues of reproductive life in the 21st century, it's going to be left behind."
Mundy writes, "Supporting abortion rights is one thing when it involves a desperate woman or girl. What about when it involves a fertility doctor implanting five embryos to raise his own clinic success rates, knowing he can then use selective reduction, which is essentially abortion by toxic injection, to winnow them down?"
Mundy put it succinctly: If you are Planned Parenthood, must you feel "OK" with any and every scenario?
Last point: Mundy argues that "the abortion-rights groups" and the "infertility-patients groups" would "seem to be natural allies." However a "real standoff" looms. Why? Because their agendas are NOT synonymous.
Pamela Madsen, the head of the American Infertility Association, snarls at the very thought of federal authorities taking a closer look at the reproductive technology industry, which is almost completely unregulated.
But Madsen also tells Mundy, "We're about creating life, not ending it....We're the put them in people, not the take them out of people."
They are caught yet again in their own pregnant-woman-as-propert y-owner worldview.
But as Mundy writes, pro-abortionists are responding. They are taking their consultants' advice to "reframe the debate" and "take back" words like "baby" and "mother."
It's no news to the very sharp, very perceptive people who read that it is simply amazing how much you can learn by reading the other side or their legions of sympathetic journalists who use news articles and online essays as a way of offering [semi-]disguised advice on strategy.