Abortion movement plays ‘gotcha’

They’re trying to catch pro-lifers off guard and speechless, and judging from this story in Newsweek, they’re all excited that it’s a brilliant new strategy. Ambush pro-life people outside an abortion clinic with a camera, throw them a spinning spit ball, catch them appearing to dodge it, and put the video up online.

The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are [should be is] a range of responses: “I’ve never really thought about it.” “I don’t have an answer for that.” “I don’t know.” “Just pray for them.”

You have to hand it to the questioner; he struggles manfully. “Usually when things are illegal there’s a penalty attached,” he explains patiently. But he can’t get a single person to be decisive about the crux of a matter they have been approaching with absolute certainty.

So, the ambush camera op is ‘manful’ and ‘patient’, while the pro-life folks are “gobsmacked.” Abortion activists are self-congratulatory over their supposed discovery that the pro-life world has never thought this through logically.

A new public-policy group called the National Institute for Reproductive Health wants to take this contradiction and make it the centerpiece of a national conversation, along with a slogan that stops people in their tracks: how much time should she do?

They are relishing their cleverness.

Okay, let’s slow this joyride down and parse the next part here…

If the Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a constitutional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states.

Got that part correct. 

If it goes to the states, some, perhaps many, will ban abortion.

Correct again.

If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal.

Wrong. Not one state has written or planned language in abortion ban legislation that would consider — or allow anyone to consider — the woman a criminal for having an abortion. The party guilty of a crime would be the abortionist. Quindlan and her abortion backer colleagues came up with this false dichotomy. (In academia, this would be a Hobson’s Choice.) They propose that, by their logic, the woman is a criminal.

 But, boy, do the doctrinaire suddenly turn squirrelly at the prospect of throwing women in jail.

If anybody on the pro-life end of that question ‘turns squirrely’, it’s because the pro-life world doesn’t reason that way, and they are not used to thinking in those terms.

But never mind the facts…these abortion activists are painting quite a fantastical picture here.

“They never connect the dots,” says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa…”How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?” June says.

Interesting. We’ve come this far in the debate before Planned Parenthood and company thought up this new ploy.

So now they feign astonishment that the pro-life movement has come this far…how?

Perhaps by ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into “victims” of their own free will.

Remarkable rhetoric in its audacity.

State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander

…”addled bystander”?… 

who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time.

What kind of language is this? Cheap, slinging sarcasm.

Such a view seemed to be a vestige of the past until

…it was resurrected by a scornful pro-abortion writer at Newsweek? Oh..wait…it was when

the Supreme Court handed down its most recent abortion decision upholding a federal prohibition on a specific procedure.

…”a federal prohibition on a specific procedure“? No cleverness there, trying to avoid even naming the partial-birth abortion ban.

 Justice Anthony Kennedy, obviously feeling excessively paternal, argued that the ban protected women from themselves.

…”obviously feeling excessively paternal…”? Scroll down to the post below. Read the description in it excerpted from Justice Kennedy’s opinion, the really graphic one that cites exactly what happens in this grisly murder of a baby being born. And realize that that’s the “specific procedure” Quindlan and Planned Parenthood are fighting to defend. Justice Kennedy and the majority upheld the ban to protect women from the devastating consequences. And legislators across the states are looking at new laws to do the same. That’s what worries these people. Which is why they distort that, too.

Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions?

No. The message is that women are already victims in abortions. Whether the abortionist is a doctor or a back-alley hack, they would be held accountable for breaking the law. Period.

Let’s finish this thing off and wrap it up.

The great thing about video is that you can see the mental wheels turning as these people realize that they somehow have overlooked something central while they were slinging certainties.

Abortion activists have been slinging their own certainties, and a lot of mean-spirited language, across the land for decades. It would be great to see a video camera capture their wheels turning. To watch the most committed pro-aborts confronted with a few questions, posed honestly and patiently, and see if there are any true epiphanies.

Here are a few proposals: If the abortion movement is really all about “choice”, why are you so opposed to actually giving women one, by following the standard medical procedure requirement of obtaining ‘informed consent’? When ‘informed consent’ laws actually make it close to passage, why do you fight them so vigorously? If you really are “pro-choice”, what do you have against giving women a two or three day consideration period….heck, even 24 hours….after allowing her to know all her options?

And while we’re at it…Why is the abortion movement on a strident campaign right now to discredit crisis pregnancy centers? Why do you call a baby a baby only if they’re ‘wanted’? Why have you turned your backs for so long on Norma McCorvey after she was useful to you as ‘Jane Roe’, after she turned pro-life and Catholic and began to work so hard to inform the public about the impact of abortion?  Do you actually realize that “reproductive rights” is a euphemism to fool the public into blanket acceptance of all contraception and abortion, or are you deluded as well? Although…if you’re deluded, you can’t answer that.

The Newsweek column smugly concludes that…

there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can’t have it both ways.

Wrongheaded, and illogical. This is the abortion movement contriving an untenable calculation. First of all, nobody in the pro-life world, nobody in state or federal government – at least nobody of reason and consequence – is considering holding women accountable for abortions after they’re banned. That stands alone. Following from that, women would not be ‘sent to prison’, nor would any other action be taken against them. The pro-life movement is engaged fully in protecting women from abortions, and from the ravages of the “procedure” if they have undergone one…or more. The pro-life movement is the only movement looking out for the health and rights of women.

Meanwhile, the effort goes on across the country to ban abortion, in a reasoned and informed manner. Like what they’ve done in South Dakota with both H.B. 1166, the informed consent bill, and H.B. 1215, the abortion ban. Here’s an important provision Planned Parenthood may want to note:

Nothing in this Act may be construed to subject the pregnant mother upon whom any abortion is performed or attempted to any criminal conviction and penalty.

Got it?