Remember when Bill Clinton argued that, ideally, abortion should be “safe, legal — and rare”? Ah, happy days. Now, if you don’t fervently endorse anything and everything up to hacking unwanted newborns to pieces, you’re a woman-hating monster.
Am I exaggerating? Only a little. Look up “partial birth abortion”, if you have the stomach for it. If you’re made of sterner stuff, listen to Planned Parenthood execs discussing selling butchered unborns like a peddlar hawking boiled puppies in a Wuhan wet market.
As I wrote about that little charmer, you don’t have to be a ranting anti-abortionist to find something deeply unsettling about listening to people dispassionately discussing selling aborted human brains and organs as if they were hawking offal at the meat market. One can imagine such chillingly casual conversations over beer and sausages in the Auschwitz canteen.
Indeed, I suspect a great many of us are not wholly opposed to abortion. It’s just that the pro-abortion goalposts have been moved to such an extreme that even a no-abortion-no-exceptions extremist starts to sound like the more reasonable of the two.
A great deal of the conversation about abortion in America is based on lies about who occupies the more extreme position. For the media and their Democratic allies, the idea is that any limitation on abortion, at any point in a pregnancy, for any reason, is tantamount to fascistic Handmaid’s Tale-style misogyny.
Of course, there is no basis for this whatsoever. For decades, a plurality of Americans have consistently supported limits on abortion that grow more popular the further along the unborn baby is to birth. Overwhelming opposition to taxpayer funding for abortion here and overseas has been just as consistent, as has been opposition to ending abortion exceptions for rape, incest, and health threats to the life of the mother. The country has been far more principled in its positioning over the years than the politicians elected to represent them.
As an example of the steady drift into rabid pro-abortionism of the Democrats, consider the recent passing by the newly-Republican-controlled House to advance the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Democrats predictably erupted into spittle-flecked fury and, with a sole exception, vociferously opposed the bill.
There’s just one thing, though: the bill was originally advanced in 2002. Back then, it had bipartisan support, passed the House by voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent.
That means every top Democrat involved in the issue today — Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi — went along with it at the time. There were zero objections […]
This illustrates just how far we’ve come from the Democratic Party that once believed in “safe, legal, and rare”; it now believes in “shouting your abortion.”
This should surprise no one, really. The same Democrat Party just a decade ago near-unanimously supported building a wall on the southern border. Now, anything less than sending mercy flights to ferry millions of illegals into the US is, apparently, to place oneself only slightly to the left of Hitler.
The new act is no different in its intent than the one Democrats wholeheartedly supported just two decades ago. The only difference is that it now has teeth:
It levies fines and up to five years in prison for those who do not provide care for an infant born alive, while explicitly exempting the mother from criminal prosecution and allowing for her to bring future civil actions against health care employees who violate the order.
Yet this time around, instead of unanimous support from Congress, just one Democrat — the last pro-life Democrat, Texas’s Henry Cuellar — voted for the bill. It is dead on arrival in the Democratic Senate.
Spectator Australia
So, no: it’s not you who’ve lost your mind if you find the new, radically pro-abortion left distasteful — it’s them.