The Democratic National Convention was a celebration of the first female major party presidential nominee. But it was also a celebration of abortion. Many of the speakers mentioned the “right to choose” and the importance of appointing “pro-choice” judges to the bench. The leaders of three abortion advocacy groups were featured in prime time. One was cheered when she said she’d had an abortion because it was “the wrong time” in her life. What’s to cheer about, even if you believe women should have that choice? She’d extinguished the life of another human, and that’s worth celebrating?
It’s not surprising that a political party for which pro-abortion absolutism is the sine qua non of elevation to the presidential nomination would feature it during the convention. Clinton has been a fierce abortion advocate over a political career of more than 40 years.
What was unjustified, even if is is electorally expedient, was that Democratic speakers treated Donald Trump’s ugly remarks about women as somehow akin to Mike Pence’s opposition to abortion. Critics suggested that both made the Republican ticket misogynist and anti-woman.
The most prominent example came from Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, who said the Trump-Pence ticket intended to “make misogyny great again.”
This rhetoric is as base as it is trite. It’s decades since feminist icon Gloria Steinem said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” For years Democrats have claimed that Republican opposition to abortion constitutes a “war on women.” A few months ago, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, who was also featured prominently at the DNC, said, “A woman voting for Ted Cruz is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.”
The idea that violent and deadly hatred of women is at the root of the pro-life position is absurd and completely cynical. It is intended to deceive voters that there is something malevolent about a movement that is, in truth, actuated by a desire to save other human beings from industrial-scale slaughter.
Women, like any other demographic group, are not monolithic. There are tens of millions of American women who oppose abortion. According to the General Social Survey, it is men, not women, who are more likely to answer “yes” to the question: Should women be allowed to get an abortion if she “wants it for any reason”? This is the extreme no-exceptions position embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine and most of the Democratic Party. There’s is a view embraced more by men than by women.
Half of abortion’s victims are girls. And the vast majority of abortions performed because the expectant parents would prefer a child of the other sex, are undertaken to get rid of unwanted girls. Isn’t aborting a baby because she’s a girl the worst kind of misogyny? When Congress had a chance to outlaw sex-selection abortion, Democrats voted it down.
It is ironic that Hogue would equate pro-life beliefs and activism with misogyny when a couple of years ago her predecessor at NARAL, Nancy Keenan, marveled at the sight of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young women, marching at the annual March for Life and remarked, “My gosh … there are so many of them, and they are so young.”
In her DNC speech, Hogue spoke of “empowering” women by passing laws that lift restrictions on abortion. But there are tens of millions of women who feel empowered not by killing their unborn children but by embracing everything about being women, including being mothers, even when it’s the wrong time in their lives.
