Abortion Appeasement

I have been thinking more about Sen. Hillary’s seemingly conciliatory tones towards pro-lifers and the move by other Democrats in the same vein. I think that their efforts totally misunderstands why pro-lifers are against abortion. They obviously understand that the whole-hearted support of abortion is not playing very well on the majority of the public and they need to get with the "values thing." Their emphasis has been on plans on how to reduce the number of abortions through both education and contraceptives. They think that simply reducing the number of abortions is a perfectly good compromise. This proves their misunderstanding.

Say for instance a plan was put forward to legalize murder. At the same time the plan would be to increase education on why people should abstain from murdering or the government providing less lethal weapons to criminals so that they might only stun you in the commission of a robbery. They would rightly argue that you can never legalize murder since it was always wrong and it would be ridiculous to believe that legalized murder would cause murder rates to go down by relying only on education and less lethal weapons. Yet this is the very approach in which they think they can appease pro-life voters.

If some lawmakers proposed to eliminate all penalties for racial discrimination and proposed instead to increase funding of classroom efforts at reducing racism again they would rightly see this as wrong. Would they accept any proposal that only worked towards reducing racism to some supposedly acceptable level? Instinctively they would understand that whatever behavior you legalize you end up with more of.

Murder, racism, and abortion are always wrong and the civil law should match up to this reality. Before Roe v. Wade the abortion rate (even with the most wildly inflated figures) was nowhere near the abortion rate now. Sure the abortion rate has started to level off with some decline but a life is a life and the fight against abortion must go on whether there are 4,000, 400, or 4 abortions in the US a day. As a side note I also wonder if the abortion rate has flattened out because there has been such a reduction in the population that there just simply are less people available of child bearing age to have abortions.

Now of course as pro-lifers we can work with measures to seek to reduce abortion and that this isn’t an all or nothing proposition. Yet we know our goal is to ultimately both to illegalize abortion and to help to change the society so that women will not want to seek abortions. This can be done in ways such as parental consent laws, informed consent laws, abstinence education (without the pollution of sexual moral relativism), and working to consistently promote the value of all life at all stages of life. Some Democrats talk a good game right now but I don’t see the majority of them supporting any kind of restriction even if it is just a matter of telling the women the medical complications of abortion. I guess we will find out when the bills on fetal pain and banning adults from helping pregnant minors cross state lines to circumvent abortion laws come to a vote.