choice savers

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 16, 2006

Leave it to the New York Times to find "abortion foes" more indignant at pro-lifers than abortionists:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. The eight women sat in a semicircle facing a wooden cross, reflecting on the abortions they said they had never gotten over. Though they now opposed abortion, they criticized the demonstrators who protest outside clinics.

"They think they're helping these women," said Mendy Mason, 34, who described being suicidal and depressed after her abortion. For women like her, she said, the demonstrators only inflict more pain.

"The pro-life movement wants to demonize the mother and concentrate on protecting the innocent child," Ms. Mason said. "But you can't rip a baby from a woman's womb without ripping out her heart. My babies are in a much better place than I am."

"The pro-life movement wants to demonize the mother." Right.

The article makes something of an advance over the NYT's usual coverage of the issue, in that it lets us hear women who regret their abortions and who acknowledge their aborted children as human beings to whom they are bound even in death. But the drum-beat for "freedom of choice" continues all the same.

Several women in the postabortion group said that they did not favor a ban on abortion, for fear of back-alley procedures, but said that women should have more information about abortion's psychological impact -- perhaps a video of women like themselves.

The piece reads to me like a softening-up barrage directed by the Hillary in 2008 campaign. Hillary understands that the image of the scowling pro-abort butch with icicles dripping off her words will not sell with the swing voters she needs to pull in, and has made some poll-tested overtures to those with ambiguous feelings on the issue, the best known of which was her admission that, for some, abortion can seem a "tragic choice." The hard-core NARAL types, however, need some reassurance that these swing voters can be bought at a price short of the promise of abortion restrictions, and this reassurance the Times has adventitiously provided.