NARAL President Slams Pro-Lifers,
March for Life, Props up Wendy Davis
by Dr. Susan Berry 22 Jan 2014, 2:06 PM
PDT
As hundreds of thousands of marchers
gathered in Washington D.C. this week for the annual March For Life, NARAL president Ilyse Hogue
penned a defensive op-ed in Politico, slamming pro-lifers for restricting “a
woman’s freedom” and declaring 2014 to be the “year the pro-choice crowd fights
back.”
Hogue’s piece is accompanied by a photo of
Texas Democrat gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis’s “pink sneakers,” worn
throughout her filibuster of Texas’s
new state law that bans abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy. Hogue’s defense
of the practice of abortion is timed not only with the 41st anniversary of Roe
v. Wade and the March for Life, but also with the fact that Davis, the pro-abortion crowd’s “national
star,” has suffered damage this week. Davis
has been discovered to have made false statements about her personal
biographical information, even while under oath in federal court.
Having just ended a year which saw 70 new
anti-abortion laws approved in 22 states (2011 had the highest number with
nearly 90 such laws approved) and a record 87 surgical abortion clinic
closures, Hogue sees real need to rally her troops:
Sure, 2013 was not a great year for
reproductive freedom – 53 anti-choice measures were adopted at the state level,
and we narrowly averted a federal government shutdown when House Republicans
demanded that bosses have control over their employees’ birth control coverage
(though we later had a shutdown, anyway).
Hogue writes, however, that not all was
bad for the pro-abortion crowd:
But 2013 also showed record-high public
support for the rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade: Twice
as many pro-choice measures as the prior year were enacted at the state level,
and voters turned out to vote into office a pro-choice governor in Virginia and
soundly defeat the first municipal ballot measure to ban abortion after 20
weeks. In 2013, we saw a movement starting to embody the old adage that the
best defense is a good offense.
Though Hogue states it will “take time for
this shifting momentum to result in a full sea change,” the “shifting momentum”
actually appears to be on the side of pro-lifers.
As Kristan Hawkins, president of Students
for Life of America (SFLA), told Breitbart News, young people, who are often
the crux of a movement, are clearly becoming more pro-life. Hawkins said that
she expected about 2,500 SFLA members alone to participate in the March for
Life.
“We are winning,” Hawkins said. “And
getting young people involved is imperative in order to ensure the success of
our mission, which is to abolish abortion in this lifetime.”
One of Hawkins's SFLA leaders is Connor
York, a young man at Oregon
State University.
York told
Breitbart News, “I feel like I am working to change our culture. Lots of people
are surprised to see young people working in the pro-life movement, and it’s
very powerful when they encounter us.”
Hogue’s perception of the tide shifting
toward the left and the pro-abortion groups may be amiss, just as her
organization was amiss when it posted a “Thank you” to Pope Francis on its
Facebook page, “from pro-choice women everywhere,” believing his statement during
one interview, in which he discussed the many issues with which Catholics must
concern themselves, meant that the pontiff was now joining the ranks of
pro-abortion advocates.
Pope Francis, in fact, tweeted his prayers
and support for pro-lifers during Wednesday's March for Life:
I join the March for Life in Washington with my
prayers. May God help us respect all life, especially the most vulnerable
Hogue’s distorted perception of the Roe v.
Wade decision itself has been underscored even by those on her political side
of the aisle.
Though the NARAL president writes that the
infamous case “enshrined into law a woman’s freedom to decide when, how, and
with whom to have a family,” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a
University of Chicago Law School group last year that the decision overruled
the democratic will by handing down a ruling made by “unelected old men.”
Ginsburg clearly indicated that the High
Court’s decision in Roe served only to galvanize opposition to abortion and
gave abortion opponents a symbol to target.
“My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to
have stopped the momentum that was on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. The
justice indicated that the Supreme Court should have, instead, “put its stamp
of approval on the side of change and let that change develop in the political
process.”
In addition, liberal constitutional
scholar Alan Dershowitz told CNBC last October that the U.S. Constitution does
not provide for a right to an abortion:
I can’t find anything in the Constitution
that says you prefer the life of the mother, or the convenience of the mother
if it’s an abortion by choice, over the potential life of the fetus. Look, I
think women if they’re required to not have abortions could die... so I favor a
woman’s right to choose. But I can’t find it in the Constitution. And
everything I favor I don’t think is necessarily constitutionally based.
Hogue refers to pro-lifers’ arguments as
“wearing thin.” But, how about hers?
Women in this country know that our economic
security depends on our ability to decide when and with whom we have families.
More and more middle-class families dependent on two incomes viscerally
understand the inextricable connection between access to family planning and
their economic outlook.
How unfortunate for Hogue’s followers that
she is pushing a creed that hypes legalized abortion as the reason that women
are able to have “economic security.” How can this be, when under Barack Obama,
the most abortion-friendly president the nation has ever seen, United States
women are seeing unemployment rates rise for their gender, most recently to 7.3
percent?
The problem for Hogue and the abortion
industry will always be that they fail to acknowledge the dignity and sanctity
of the life of the unborn.
As Lila Rose, president of Live Action,
told Breitbart News from the 2014 March for Life:
The pro-abortion mainstream media, who
will tape a dozen abortion advocates on a street corner, somehow misses
hundreds of thousands speaking out, every year, for those who have no voice.
But new and social media are getting the word out: there is a terrible
injustice in our country, and it's past time for us to fix it. The cry of the
unborn will be heard.
Roe v. Wade
Harry
A. Blackmun wrote majority decision for Roe vs. Wade,
and Harold H. Koh was his clerk.
Note: Harry
Blackmun
Harold Andrew Blackmun (November 12, 1908
– March 4, 1999) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
from 1970 until 1994. Appointed by the conservative President Nixon, Blackmun
ultimately became the most liberal justice on the Court. He is best known as
the author of the Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade.
Harold H. Koh
was Harry A. Blackmun’s clerk, the State
Department legal adviser for the Barack Obama
administration, and a director at the Human Rights
First.
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Human
Rights First, and the American Constitution
Society, the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), and Media Matters.
George Soros
was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open
Society, a contributor for MoveOn.org, and
is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations.
Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Human Rights
First, the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), and the Planned Parenthood Federation
of America.
Barbra
Streisand Foundation was a funder for the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America, and the American
Constitution Society.
Caroline
Fredrickson is the president of the American Constitution
Society, was the Washington
legislative director for the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), and the general counsel for the NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Ilyse Hogue
is the president for the NARAL Pro-Choice America,
a senior adviser for Media Matters,
and was a director of political advocacy for MoveOn.org.
Abortion's toll of 55 million
called 'genocide' (Past Research)
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
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