I don't usually post other messages on my blog site, but thought this was sufficiently significant to warrant this post. Go to thechristians.com for daily updates on contemporary Christianity. This piece was posted in their daily email, May 6, 2013
A sequence of surprising recent
reversals have knocked the pro-choice cause
By Link Byfield May 6, 2013
When the most militantly pro-abortion president in American
history cruised to his re-election victory last November, rueful pro-life
Christians had no comfort beyond Paul’s advice to the Galatians: “Let us not
become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest
if we do not give up.” Pro-lifers did not give up, and today, a mere six months
later, the situation is starting to look quite different.
Somehow the pro-choice steamroller – juggernaut – call it
what you will – has lost momentum. They expected Obama’s victory to mark their
final triumph in the culture war. It has proved to be far from that.
Unforeseen problem one for pro-choicers is Obama himself. He
has stalled. He is not exactly unpopular, but even his Congressional allies now
admit he can’t seem to get anything done right or done at all. As veteran
pundit Peggy Noonan put it, it’s too soon to say he’s a lame duck; he’s just
lame.
He did manage to push through his “Obamacare” health care
insurance plan, forcing Americans to pay for abortions through their health
insurance premiums. However, the massive public insurance initiative is turning
out to be such a costly and complex legal and administrative fiasco that it may
have to be in large measure dismantled.
Unforeseen problem two for pro-choicers two is Kermit
Gosnell, the now-notorious Philadelphia abortionist. Bad enough,
from the pro-choice perspective, that the friendly mainstream media were shamed
into belatedly covering the Gosnell trial. (Update: after three
days of deliberation the jury was sent home for the weekend.) Now pro-lifers
are showing that Gosnell’s alleged infanticidal activities may not be all that
rare.
Unforeseen problem three for pro-choice is Lila Rose and her
group Live Action. Since Gosnell hit the headlines, Live Action has released
three video interviews secretly recorded by women in
their third trimester asking workers at Planned Parenthood-affiliated clinics
whether they provide late-term abortions (the clear response is yes), and if
the child is born alive, will they try to save its life (the clear answer is
no, even though it would then be a legal person under U.S. law).
Rose, a UCLA history graduate from San Jose who is now age
24, founded Live Action when she was 15 and is seen by many as the most
effective new voice in the culture war. Adept at bypassing mainstream media
through social media, Live Action has amassed considerable evidence that
abortion clinics, especially those affiliated with or belonging to Planned
Parenthood, are flagrantly tolerant of sexual abuse, racism, gender selection,
sex trafficking, deliberate disinformation, infanticide, and medical
incompetence and malpractice.
Rose has reduced abortion industry spokesmen and their media
allies to spluttering incoherency – as for instance the lawyer for an exposed
abortionist in D.C. protesting that Live Action’s video-sting constituted an
“outrageous intrusion” on doctor-patient privacy.
Unforeseen pro-choice problem four is their slow defeat at
the U.N. As far back as the Cairo Conference in 1994 pro-choice activists have
invested massive covert funding and political capital in making legalized
abortion the centre-piece of “women’s health” world-wide. Their strategy was to
link “overpopulation” to global recognition of “reproductive rights.”
But as Wendy Wright reported last week from New York,
U.N. depopulation officials are now admitting that in two decades they have
made no political progress. Babatunde Osotimehin, U.N. population fund
director, told an on-site Planned Parenthood gathering on May 2 that his
organization still “gets push-back from just about every part of the world:
Africa, Asia, Central America, Latin America and Europe.” In short, all
attempts of the past generation to make abortion a universal human right tied
to health care have failed so often that member nations are reaching the point
of refusing to debate it.
Just as the Live Action videos were hitting the Internet
last month, Planned Parenthood trumpeted on Tuesday, April 23, that two
evenings hence, on Thursday, April 25, President Obama would deliver the
keynote to their annual gala. He would be the first U.S. president ever to address
the organization. Payback time, apparently: non-profit Planned Parenthood
contributed $15 million to his last campaign. But on Wednesday, April 24, the
White House announced that the president would not be delivering the keynote
address. Due to a scheduling conflict he would deliver a brief message on
Friday, April 25 instead. Opinion was divided as to which side looked more
foolish from this snafu.
Obama spoke for 12 minutes, never mentioned the word
“abortion,” told them he was on their side, and asked God to bless them.