Safe, Legal, and Hillary
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By George Neumayr
Published 1/27/2005 12:08:21 AMHillary Clinton's idea of an overture to pro-life groups is to blame those who oppose abortion for its spread. This line of reasoning is comically convoluted, but Hillary Clinton has been trying it out anyway, saying President Bush is responsible for the rise in abortion in some states because he won't fund her favorite prophylactic programs.
But even in extending a thorn branch to pro-life groups, Hillary Clinton draws gasps, head shaking, and troubled silence from pro-abortion activists. So reported the press after she said earlier in the week that "We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic, choice to many, many women." Notice that she didn't say it is a tragic choice for the aborted babies, only for the women who get abortions.
But this was still too much for the crowd. To them abortion is a cause not for tears but for sighs of relief. After the speech, Martha Stahl, director for public relations and marketing for Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood, disputed the characterization of abortion as a tragic choice, telling the New York Times that "we see women express relief more than anything else that they have the freedom to choose."
This sentiment, not Clinton's rhetorical repositioning in the wake of a bewildering defeat, represents the real feeling on the pro-abortion side. In fact, leading pro-abortion theorists have been arguing recently that unless abortion is seen as an unambiguous good the movement will die. They reason that if abortion is increasingly seen as a tragedy, then society will question the practice and ultimately ban it. Feelings of remorse invite the political order to scrutinize the source of the remorse. So Planned Parenthood is urging women to take pride in their abortions.
The "I Had An Abortion" T-shirts Planned Parenthood sold online last year were an attempt to "demystify and destigmatize it," said a spokesman for the group. The strategy here is to normalize abortion, make it so commonplace that no one will think to question it. If you can talk happily and casually about your abortions -- as Barbara Ehrenreich did in the New York Times last year in a piece titled "Owning Up to Abortion" -- then how bad can the practice be?
Understanding this psychology, Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, has been emphasizing that abortion advocates should go beyond "choice" -- an insipid, evasive rhetoric, he thinks -- and celebrate abortion unapologetically. After all, he says, the unborn child is an interloper who deserves death. "The unborn child is not just an innocent life," he writes, but a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family."
Imnotsorry.net is a website that reflects the culture of abortion without apology that Sanger believes essential to the movement's survival. According to its founders, the website -- which allows women to post testimonials expressing their "relief" and "joy" after an abortion -- "was created for the purpose of showing women that exercising their legal right to terminate their pregnancy is not the blood-splattered guilt trip so many make it out to be."
Ron Fitzimmons, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, has told the press, "We have nothing to hide. The work we're doing is good. We are there to help women, and it's important to talk about abortion so that it's not a stigma." Like Sanger, Fitzimmons eschews "choice" talk as too weak and vague to protect abortion. He implies that since everybody now knows that abortion means killing a child abortion advocates will have to sell the public on abortion as not just as a choice, but as a good choice -- it is better that unborn babies die. "We can no longer respond to [pro-life arguments] with 'it's your right to choose'…We need to recapture the notion that abortion is a difficult moral choice for women, but one that is, in fact, a moral choice."
Hillary Clinton's contrived overtures to pro-life groups represent a return to the fake mantra of safe, legal, and rare that Dick Morris taught her to memorize. To fool mainstream America Hillary Clinton figures that she will have to head-fake her supporters from time to time (à la her husband and Sister Souljah). But what is said beneath the podium at pro-abortion events by the Alexander Sangers is far more significant than any self-serving political noises she makes above it. When Hillary Clinton says safe, legal, and rare, they hear safe, legal, and often.
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.Copyright 2005, The American Spectator
Reply 1 - Posted by: mustng66, 1/27/2005 12:21:53 AM
Understanding this psychology, Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, has been emphasizing that abortion advocates should go beyond "choice" -- an insipid, evasive rhetoric, he thinks -- and celebrate abortion unapologetically. After all, he says, the unborn child is an interloper who deserves death. "The unborn child is not just an innocent life," he writes, but a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family."
Adolph Hitler couldn't have said it better....
Reply 2 - Posted by: pallis, 1/27/2005 1:05:07 AM
Hillary should just pull her prophylactics off her Christmas tree, and pass them out.
Reply 3 - Posted by: MsCharlotteVale, 1/27/2005 3:33:45 AM
The feminist agenda has been a replaying of man's downfall in the Garden of Eden. We're not living in my grandmother's time where birth control was unknown or unavailable. Birth control is available 24/7 in America. The whole abortion 'holy grail' has turned off and repulsed me. Apparently, sex education isn't working as well as the no-sex-education I grew up with.
Reply 4 - Posted by: Maybeth, 1/27/2005 5:48:18 AM
Hillary's next act will probably include her 'public embrace' on stage of an African~American. This will be to assure minorities that she does not fit into the mold of liberal racism. Maybe she'll even do the infamous 'Arafat kiss.'
Reply 5 - Posted by: dlentz10, 1/27/2005 6:47:01 AM
H.R. Clinton lies. Abortion can never be made safe. Abortion is procedure intended to kll a living human being. We should never stand in silence while killing is described as safe.
David
Reply 6 - Posted by: WhamDBambam, 1/27/2005 6:56:15 AM
If her lips are moving, she's lying.
Reply 7 - Posted by: oldgloomanddoom, 1/27/2005 7:05:24 AM
This is Newspeak, and it is 1984 by Orwell.
Reply 8 - Posted by: Jethro bo, 1/27/2005 7:16:57 AM
Hitlery is triangulating her way to left wing kook Nirvana. To prevent abortions, prophylactic programs must be funded and increased. What is the most effective prophylactic program? Abstinence. But of course Hitlery could never advocate that. So what is the next best way to have sex and avoid pregnancy? You got is, homosexual sex. So eventually Hitlery will advocate homosexual sex to avoid unwanted pregnancy and the Feds should funded it. Now if she could just mix in global warming she would hit the liberal trifecta of increased spending, homosexual advocacy and environmental loony policies.
Reply 9 - Posted by: Barlyk, 1/27/2005 7:59:01 AM
Hillary is a total fraud. Wake up Hillary fans, read tools.
Reply 10 - Posted by: Desert Fox, 1/27/2005 8:11:35 AM
Poster #1 gets to the MEAT of the Ideological Thought process that is the Core belief of those who advocate the Genocidal Process of Infanticide.
Abortion is utilised as a primary means of a 100% Full proof practice of Birth Control in order to assure Sexual Promiscuity without Conscience or Consequence.
I do not recall my Grandparents ever having a need for Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, or other enhancements. Just look at the average age group that these things target. The Baby Boom Generation, those as far as I'am concerned were born between 1945 to 1955.
What does it say about a person who will elevate their Individual Sexual Pleasures over the life of an infant in a Mothers womb?
Reply 11 - Posted by: hoglah, 1/27/2005 8:54:38 AM
There is no common ground on Abortion. It is either right or wrong. Now that she has become a praying person maybe she should forget about what is politically correct and look to the Scriptures for the answer to Abortion.
Reply 12 - Posted by: MMC, 1/27/2005 9:02:17 AM
I read an article stating that the condoms from Planned Parenthood failed a greater percentage of the time. So, a built in client base for the pro-abortion crowd. Not to mention, return money. Each abortion is money, not the stopping of a life to these calous thugs.
Mrs. Clinton can speak with a forked tongue, but her actions will speak louder.
Reply 13 - Posted by: gumbino, 1/27/2005 9:04:10 AM
Ha, #2, thanks for that blast from the not-so-distant past.
The Ghost of Christmas Past points us to Hillary's lovely obscene Christmas tree, as described by Gary Aldrich (who, btw, has been proved soooooo right).
