Re: The legacy of Roe v. Wade

Yesterday, I wrote about the disturbing new pro-abortion ad from the Center for Reproductive Rights and how it represents a larger degradation of our country's respect for life.  Today, the liberal media site Salon features an opinion piece even more disturbing.

LifeNews' Steven Ertelt describes it as "one of the most extreme pro-abortion diatribes ever written."

Just check out this headline:

"So what?"

Not only is the author admitting that life starts at conception -- an argument the liberal left likes to deny -- but she's admitting that life of the baby is just not important enough to make her second-guess her pro-choice stance.  "I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice," she admits.

The author, Mary Elizabeth Williams, argues that the life of the fetus should not be placed above the mother's interests.  It is "a life worth sacrificing," she writes.

On one point, I actually agree with Williams (emphasis mine):

I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

This is a point I've long-thought the left needed to admit and I'm relieved that someone finally has.  Sadly, this is where the ideological kumbaya ends.  And here is where the divisions deepen:

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

I didn't realize that the concept of human rights were divided into "autonomous" and "non-autonomous" categories... and then the left wonders why conservatives warn about things like "death panels."

As I see it, the purpose of this column isn't to educate or inform.  Instead, it seems to fit the bill for traditional progressive strategy: the more you shock your audience, the more desensitized it becomes.  As I wrote yesterday, society has changed dramatically in the past few decades, gone from a place where abortion was an exception, not the rule.  You'll notice that Williams leaves the pro-choice arguments of the past in her dust.  Instead of protecting the life of the mother, abortion should now be acceptable based on the preferences of the mother.

Alinksy's Rule 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”

If we're now at a place where people generally accept abortion as a "necessary evil," expect the left to continue pushing the issue and redefining good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.  They'll keep pushing the issue until what was once considered unacceptable is not only acceptable, but expected.