The Tragedy of the Durbin Democrats

As news stories generally go, the retirement of a longtime member of Congress typically causes barely a ripple in the pool of politics. Unless the personage was a major power player or notorious for some other reason, our system of government treats the coming and going of most elected officials with only a modicum of interest.

So it is likely to be with Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who, having served seven terms in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate, announced he is retiring at the end of next year. The senator’s record in the overall does not scream controversy and his official catalog of accomplishments pays homage to achievements like curbing youth smoking and the First Step Act, bipartisan legislation designed to provide “opportunities for those who are incarcerated to prepare to re-enter society successfully.”

On some matters, however, like the rest of the Democratic Party today, Durbin evinced a stridently doctrinaire point of view. In January of this year, the U.S. Senate held a floor debate on the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a measure designed to ensure that any child that survives an abortion attempt is entitled to the same standard of care and life support as a wanted child that is born prematurely. Durbin’s office issued a press release that “condemn[ed]” the bill as a sham and declared that children rarely survive abortions. The argument is factually false but in its own way irrelevant — the tragedy of induced abortion is that it takes children who are very much alive in the womb and subjects them to lethal measures intended to ensure they cannot survive. The Born Alive bill would have protected only the hardiest or more fortunate few.

The tragedy is compounded for Durbin and his fellow Democrats because neither he nor they always felt this way. In 1989, after multiple terms as a member of the House of Representatives, Durbin wrote a letter to an Illinois constituent that repeated his conviction that Roe v. Wade should be reversed. “I believe we should end abortion on demand, and at every opportunity I have translated that belief into votes in the House of Representatives. I am opposed to the use of federal funds to pay for elective abortions, and will continue to support amendments to prohibit the funding of elective abortions for federal employees and Medicaid recipients.” This stance held for the congressman for more than 15 years — but it apparently ran into the axiom that “everything that rises must converge,” at least insofar as what it takes to win statewide or national office in today’s Democratic Party.

This is the same period of political history in which the Democrats declared their allegiance to abortion by blocking the candidacy of one of the most popular governors in their entire history — Robert Casey, Sr., of Pennsylvania. Casey was in every other respect a modern Democrat, a friend to unions and programs to alleviate poverty, a champion of working people in an industrial state that the Democrats considered critical to their success as recently as last November. Casey won the state twice, defeating a Republican challenger in 1991 by nearly 1.1 million votes. Despite this record-breaking success, and in the face of Casey’s overall record of consistency with his party’s platform, he was barred from speaking at the 1992 Democratic Party convention over his desire to discuss abortion in his speech. The exclusion proved to be a Rubicon for the party. If a candidate of Casey’s eloquence and stature could not break the barrier legal abortion posed to national leadership, no one could.

The magnitude of the transformation is hard to overestimate. I arrived in Washington in 1978 and began work soon thereafter for the National Right to Life Committee as its legislative director. In those early days post Roe v. Wade, I spent equal time in Democratic and Republican offices, talking to champions of the unborn and wheedling any pro-Roe politicians in both parties who would accept meetings on the issue. Votes on the issue in both chambers reflected this non-partisan framework, alongside the usual and very popular sniping between the parties, each accusing the other of being insufficiently concerned about collateral issues that might impact an abortion decision.

For example, on June 24, 1976, when the House approved a bar on funding or promotion of elective abortions by a margin of 199-165, the majority of the yeas were provided by Democrats (107). Democratic senators of the period, like their House counterparts, leaned pro-Roe but included pro-life stalwarts like William Proxmire of Wisconsin, Ed Zorinsky of Nebraska, and Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. Others like Senator Frank Church supported abortion with narrow exceptions but opened their doors to NRLC for discussion and debate. The fact that Utah’s populace was pro-life certainly helped.

What changed for the Democrats was mirrored by changes among Republicans, who became more expressively pro-life with each party platform adopted after 1976 and particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan. For a time, a number of leading Democrats continued to vote pro-life and to register their views at meeting with pro-life delegates, particularly around the March for Life. On one occasion I joined a delegation from New York state for their meeting with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan told us, with apparent sincerity, that his meetings with pro-life groups were a relief because they were among the few constituents who came to him with no requests for their own benefit. (Incidentally, he later voted for the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, saying that for him the practice “was too close to infanticide.”)

“I’m a liberal on health care because I believe it is a birth right of every human being — not just some damn privilege to be meted out to a few people. But when it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother. I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body." — Senator Joseph Robinette Biden (June 1974)

“It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong. Let me assure you that I share your belief that innocent human life must be protected, and I have an open mind about how to further this goal.” — Rep. Al Gore, 1984

“In 1977 . . . then a freshman congressman, [he] endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. He proclaimed, ‘Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception.’” — Rep. Richard Gephardt

Politicians, of course, often change their minds, and one gambit many use on the abortion issue is to assert that they still believe abortion is wrong and insist they would discourage a family member from having one. But, as Durbin’s opposition to protecting even a survivor of abortion shows, this duality has difficulty standing on its own. Once a position changes, language has a habit of evolving into the boilerplate rhetoric of the side one has embraced. Thus, even as he maintains he still rejects abortion, a recent Durbin statement proclaimed, “As a result of Roe, America’s women took a giant step forward in gender equity — the decision in Roe afforded women the right to choose whether, when, and how to start a family.” Another changed Democrat, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who initially supported a human life amendment to the Constitution, chose to attend the 2023 State of the Union Address wearing a pin with the word “abortion” emblazoned on it. The “O” in abortion was represented by a heart symbol. It is hard to see such words and deeds as conveying a belief that abortion is wrong.

Today, Democratic advocates for the unborn do exist at the state level and some, like former Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, remain outspoken. Lipinski too fell victim to his party’s adamant orthodoxy, drawing massive funding for a primary opponent, Marie Newman, who defeated his bid for re-election in 2020 citing his pro-life views as her rationale for running. In his concession speech, Lipinski decided to address the question of whether he wished he had abandoned his pro-life convictions. He said:

“I could never give up protecting the most vulnerable human beings in the world, simply to win an election. My faith teaches, and the Democratic Party preaches, that we should serve everyone, especially the most vulnerable. To stand in solidarity with the vulnerable is to become vulnerable. But there is no higher calling for anyone.”

The Democratic Party now seems hardened in its endorsement of unlimited and publicly funded abortion. But the Republican Party is likewise, once again, approaching a time for choosing. The GOP paved the way for the reversal of Roe v. Wade, an act of judicial restoration on one of the pre-eminent questions of our time. But some of its leaders have spent the years since the Dobbs decision as if they are apologizing for the ruling. Two full years after it was handed down, abortions are at their highest level in seven years. No federal legislation is under active consideration, even measures that have public support and the party backed in 2016. The GOP platform has suffered serious dilution. Its future course is uncertain.

It is fantastical that a Democratic Party that has shunned “Reagan Democrats” for decades could turn toward the unborn (especially when some leaders now think attacking pregnancy centers is a sound or moral proposition), but it is bracing to think how little the party would have to move and be as or more protective than the passive GOP. Opposing dismemberment abortions, protecting pain capable children, or picking, arbitrary as it would be, some week in pregnancy beyond which abortion is outlawed at the national level — each would be further than the current Republican House and Senate majorities seem willing to go. Ensuring a woman about to ingest abortion pills has medical tests to ensure her pregnancy is not ectopic and not advanced beyond Food and Drug Administration limits — even these minimal steps would represent more protection than we now have.

Durbin and his Democratic colleagues had it right the first time when they embraced the sanctity of life in the womb. Our nation needs a change of course, and if retirements and new faces are one way to get there, the journey cannot begin too soon.

I remember as a kid in the late eighties going to Washington for the March For Life. Visiting various Democrat and Republican congress members, it seemed that many of them were at least interested in reducing the number of abortions. A few years later, after Bubba was elected President, it all changed. Pro abort politicians were fanatical, and almost gleeful in their support of child killing. When the evil Clintons took over Washington, I think that the demons of hell were loosed in our country.

“The senator’s record in the overall does not scream controversy...”

You’ve got to be tzhitting us! This prick is as loathesome as they come!

........like the rest of the Democrat abortion worshippers......Dick Durbin emitted a strident, hate-filled point of view wrt a US Senate floor debate on the “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” designed to ensure that a child that survives an abortion is entitled to the same standard of care and life support as a wanted child born prematurely.

Durbin’s office “condemned” the bill as a sham and declared that children rarely
survive abortions............. which he knows, or should know, to be factually false.

The tragedy of induced abortion is that it takes children alive in the womb and subjects them to horrific lethal measures intended to ensure they cannot survive. The “Born Alive” bill would have protected only the hardiest, more fortunate few.

Democrats have terrible messengers. Most only know the game of blaming without solutions. The old politicians are grumpy and old. The message is old without any intuition.

Turban Durbin as Rush used to call him. I will always recall him calling our troops Nazis from the Senate floor (over Abu Ghraib). Eff him. Another useless POS in The Senate.

I remember thinking some time ago (maybe as far back as the 90’s) that the Democratic party didn’t have a coherent future if it supported abortion. That issue drew a bright line of morality between the parties. Before that, the parties in many ways agreed on what a good life for the country’s people was but disagreed on how to achieve it. Now that’s surely not the case and all the Democrats have is smoke and mirrors and lies.

“ seven terms in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate”

That’s one of the root causes of the ills in our nation.

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