Moving in Opposite Directions on Abortion

Even in our era of politics without precedent, few things are as inexplicable as the Democratic Party's decision to take increasingly extreme positions on abortion while so much of the country moves in a different direction.

The March for Life, held annually in Washington, D.C., around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, is one visible example of the country's mood on the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. The number of participants in the march continues to grow each year. Last week's March for Life was notable not only for its size (no official numbers are available, but video footage suggests well over 100,000 people) but because Donald Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to address the march, drawing additional national (and international) attention to the event.

Commentators have observed that fully half of the marchers are college-aged or younger. ("We are the pro-life generation" is a popular sign seen at the march.) This may well suggest a generational shift in perspective, which poses interesting electoral consequences for the future.

The number of abortions has dropped dramatically over the past 30 years. The Guttmacher Institute released a report in September of last year stating that the number of abortions had dropped 19% between 2011 (1,058,000 abortions) and 2017 (862,000 abortions), and the abortion rate (number of abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44) dropped by 20% during the same time period. This is part of a steady downward trend from the all-time high of over 1,420,000 abortions in 1990.

Guttmacher's policy stance is pro-abortion, and the report's authors take pains to state that abortion restrictions passed by 32 states in recent years are not responsible for the decline in abortions. Given that this trend started years earlier, that conclusion seems reasonable. However, they cannot definitively identify any other specific cause(s) for the decline.

Perhaps it is the advent of modern medical technology, which has pushed fetal viability back to 22 weeks. (A handful of children born at 21 weeks have survived.) Fetal surgery has become a growing specialty, and surgeons can now repair heart defects and hernias, correct spina bifida and remove tumors while the child is still growing and developing in the womb. Even those whose babies are not dealing with medical emergencies in utero or born prematurely can see the humanity of the unborn child in traditional ultrasound (which did not exist when Roe v. Wade was decided) or the more advanced 4D ultrasound.

Further, research on fetal neurological development suggests that the unborn child can feel pain at around 20 weeks; this revelation has prompted a number of legislative initiatives to severely limit abortions after that gestational age. The most recent work -- conducted by a Planned Parenthood consulting physician -- puts the fetal pain threshold even earlier, at 13 weeks.

Much better scientific knowledge about fetal development, therefore, might well be driving down the abortion rate.

So, too, might widespread shock and revulsion at some of the abortion industry's horror stories exposed in recent years.

The corpses of over 2,000 dead fetuses were found in the home and car of former Illinois and Indiana abortion doctor Ulrich Klopfer after he passed away last year. In 2015, undercover journalist David Daleiden released a series of videos in which Planned Parenthood physicians and staff members appeared to be discussing the sale of fetal body parts, performing abortions so as to best preserve the organs of unborn children for sale and other ghastly practices. In 2013, Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was convicted of three counts of murder (among other crimes) in the deaths of babies born alive after abortion attempts, who Gosnell subsequently killed by cutting their spinal cords with scissors. Gosnell's trial exposed not only the grossly unsanitary conditions of his clinic, the illegal abortions performed by untrained staff members, and the grisly "trophies" he kept in jars and boxes but also -- most disturbingly -- the complete failure of government oversight.

Is it any wonder that a majority of Americans favor reasonable regulations on abortions, such as mandatory medical disclosures and ultrasounds, brief waiting periods, hospital admitting privileges for physicians performing abortions, and parental notification laws for minor girls seeking abortions?

Last year, the Democratic-controlled New York legislature passed the Reproductive Health Act, which permits abortion at any time until birth. The law removed the restriction requiring abortions to be performed by a physician. And it removed any references to an unborn child from New York's penal code -- meaning that someone who attacks a pregnant woman and kills her child in utero cannot be prosecuted for the death of that child. It also removes any requirement to provide medical care for a baby that survives abortion.

California and Illinois -- both states controlled by Democrats -- have also passed laws expanding abortion. California now requires all private health insurers to cover abortion. Illinois' 2019 law removed its prior ban of partial-birth abortion and states that no "fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent rights" under Illinois law. Virginia's legislature, controlled by Democrats since the 2018 midterm elections, is removing previous regulations including the requirement that abortions be performed by a physician, mandatory counseling and a 24-hour waiting period.

This year's Democratic presidential candidates are just as strident. At a town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, last Sunday, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was asked by voter Kristen Day if the Democratic Party still has room for pro-life Democrats. Day, the executive director of Democrats for Life of America, stated that this amounts to 21 million voters.

Buttigieg punted. In later interviews, Day concluded that there is no longer any place for pro-life Democrats in her party.

If leading Democrats aren't interested in the views of a majority of Americans, or millions of their own voters, just who are they trying to please?

The sad fact is that the Democrat Party's hard line stand on "abortion" (population control) is neither "inexplicable" nor hard to understand when one considers that the Democrat Party's Progressive ideology relies on an arbitrary socialist economic philosophy in order for it to be even minimally functional for a brief time.

" Dr. Kathi Aultman told a U.S. Congressional committee in 2017 that she referred to unborn babies as 'fetuses' when killing them in abortions but 'babies' when they were wanted; and she regretted the incongruity. She also said she was fascinated by the 'tiny but perfectly formed limbs, intestines, kidneys, and other organs' of aborted babies."

Aultman, in the first clause of her statement summarizes the semantic trickery Liberals/Progressives knowingly used to implement their takeover of the minds of American citizens before 1973 in order to impose their population control method of destroying babies in order to facilitate the goals of socialism for America.

Please note especially the first paragraph highlighted and quoted below from the Liberty Fund Library "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), Chapter 1, final paragraphs from Edward Stanley Robertson's essay, "The Impracticability of Socialism":
Note the writer's emphasis that the "scheme of Socialism" requires what he calls "the power of restraining the increase in population"--long the essential and primary focus of the Democrat Party in the U. S.:
"I have suggested that the scheme of Socialism is wholly incomplete unless it includes a power of restraining the increase of population, which power is so unwelcome to Englishmen that the very mention of it seems to require an apology. I have showed that in France, where restraints on multiplication have been adopted into the popular code of morals, there is discontent on the one hand at the slow rate of increase, while on the other, there is still a 'proletariat,' and Socialism is still a power in politics.
I.44
"I have put the question, how Socialism would treat the residuum of the working class and of all classes—the class, not specially vicious, nor even necessarily idle, but below the average in power of will and in steadiness of purpose. I have intimated that such persons, if they belong to the upper or middle classes, are kept straight by the fear of falling out of class, and in the working class by positive fear of want. But since Socialism purposes to eliminate the fear of want, and since under Socialism the hierarchy of classes will either not exist at all or be wholly transformed, there remains for such persons no motive at all except physical coercion. Are we to imprison or flog all the 'ne'er-do-wells'?
I.45
"I began this paper by pointing out that there are inequalities and anomalies in the material world, some of which, like the obliquity of the ecliptic and the consequent inequality of the day's length, cannot be redressed at all. Others, like the caprices of sunshine and rainfall in different climates, can be mitigated, but must on the whole be endured. I am very far from asserting that the inequalities and anomalies of human society are strictly parallel with those of material nature. I fully admit that we are under an obligation to control nature so far as we can. But I think I have shown that the Socialist scheme cannot be relied upon to control nature, because it refuses to obey her. Socialism attempts to vanquish nature by a front attack. Individualism, on the contrary, is the recognition, in social politics, that nature has a beneficent as well as a malignant side. The struggle for life provides for the various wants of the human race, in somewhat the same way as the climatic struggle of the elements provides for vegetable and animal life—imperfectly, that is, and in a manner strongly marked by inequalities and anomalies. By taking advantage of prevalent tendencies, it is possible to mitigate these anomalies and inequalities, but all experience shows that it is impossible to do away with them. All history, moreover, is the record of the triumph of Individualism over something which was virtually Socialism or Collectivism, though not called by that name. In early days, and even at this day under archaic civilisations, the note of social life is the absence of freedom. But under every progressive civilisation, freedom has made decisive strides—broadened down, as the poet says, from precedent to precedent. And it has been rightly and naturally so.
I.46
"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON

An examination of the history of nations reveals the long and arduous struggle by human beings for individual liberty--from kings, from masters, from whatever description fitted those other human beings who gained power and exercised it over their fellow citizens.
By whatever semantic maneuver those power holders chose to identify themselves, no matter how benevolent they purported to be, the end was the same: some individuals in the society or group were denied their Creator-endowed rights to be free.
In America, in the Year 1776, a genius group of freedom loving individuals declared a set of principles by which, if accepted, a society of like-minded individuals could enjoy "the pursuit of happiness."
Eleven years later, they "constituted" a form of self-government to assure that the goals of their Constitution's Preamble were to become reality for the nation.
The Preamble began with the words,
We, the People. . . .

The goal, of course, was the expansion, or enlargement, of liberty for individuals in the society--not the enlargement of government!
Perhaps Donald Trump's greatest achievement to this point can be described as one man's effort to "expand liberty" for individuals and to "contract government power," thereby allowing just a little individual freedom to flourish as it did in America both prior to 1776 and thereafter.
By the way, has anyone here read Burke's Speech on Conciliation. . . . lately? If not, please read his description of how the "spirit of liberty" among the colonists, even before 1776, had resulted in the American colonies literally "feeding" the Old World!
The word, "liberty" freedom should, once again, become the watchword for American citizens.

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