If NARAL has a man of the year award, it should go to Todd Akin.
Not only did the newly minted Missouri Senate candidate express his position on abortion in the most discrediting way possible, he threatens Republican hopes to take the Senate. By throwing away a winnable seat, he could preserve a Democratic majority that will sooner desecrate the American flag on the Senate floor than restrict abortion in any manner.
Predictably, the Akin flap has created a feeding frenzy. In recent days, the national political debate has seemingly telescoped down to the question of whether abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest. The Republican platform is silent on these exceptions, while Paul Ryan opposes them, stoking Democratic attacks and media analysis about the renewal of the fabled “war on women.”
The Democrats and the press habitually travel in a pack, but never more so than when a social or cultural issue is involved, especially one touching on sexual morality. Then, it’s not a matter of mere partisanship or a rooting interest. It’s personal.
From a strictly down-the-middle, neutral perspective, if one side of a debate is “extreme,” the opposite and countervailing side is equally “extreme.” It would never even occur to the media to apply this standard to abortion. Under the guise of upholding abortion rights, Barack Obama could favor denying legal protection to babies after they are born and the press wouldn’t bat an eyelash. In fact—he did.
In the Illinois legislature, he opposed the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act” three times. The bill recognized babies born after attempted abortions as persons and required doctors to give them care. Obama’s stalwart opposition to the bill came up during the 2008 campaign, and his team responded with a farrago of obfuscation and distortions.
The bill was supposedly redundant. Except it wasn’t. Protections for infants who survived abortions were shot through with loopholes, which is why the bill was offered in the first place. (Abortion doctors were leaving infants to die without any care.) The bill was supposedly a threat to abortion rights. Except it wasn’t. Obama opposed a version that stipulated it didn’t affect the legal status of infants still in the womb.
About a year after his final vote against the bill, Obama gave his famous 2004 Democratic convention speech extolling post-partisan moderation. But he couldn’t even bring himself to protect infants brutalized and utterly alone in some medical facility taking what might be only a few fragile breaths on this Earth. Some moderation. The federal version of the bill that he opposed in Illinois passed the U.S. Senate unanimously. Some post-partisanship.
President Obama is an extremist on abortion. He has never supported any meaningful restriction on it, and never will.
He opposed a partial-birth abortion bill in Illinois, even as the federal version passed the House with 282 votes and the Senate with 64 votes and was signed into law by President Bush in 2003. He arrived in the U.S. Senate in time to denounce the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the ban.
In 2007, he told the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that his first act as president would be signing the Freedom of Choice Act. The act would enshrine in federal law a right to abortion more far-reaching than in Roe v. Wade and eliminate basically all federal and state-level restrictions on abortion. This isn’t a point its supporters contest; it’s one they brag about. The National Organization for Women says it would “sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.”
The Freedom of Choice Act won’t reach the president’s desk. His support of it, though, shows how it is impossible to stake out a position further to his left on the issue, unless, perhaps, you are performing abortions yourself.
In May, a bi-partisan majority of the House, including 20 Democrats, voted to ban abortion for the purpose of sex selection. As the National Right to Life Committee noted, it didn’t occur to reporters to ask the White House about the president’s position on the legislation, with the honorable exception of Jake Tapper (who, for some reason, is always the honorable exception).
A White House spokeswoman said: “The government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way.” In other words, gender-based discrimination is OK—so long as it results in an abortion.
According to a poll commissioned by the Charlotte Lozier Institute about 80 percent of people oppose sex-selective abortions.
As a general matter, Todd Akin’s position on the issue is closer to the American mainstream than Obama’s. The public doesn’t agree with Akin on the hardest cases, but as my National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru points about, most people oppose most abortions. In a Gallup survey in 2011, 61 percent of men said that abortion should be legal in few or no circumstances, and 60 percent of women said the same.
Gallup usually doesn’t find much of a gender gap on abortion, although there is one in this year’s survey. Fifty-three percent of men identified themselves as “pro-life,” and forty-six percent of women. Even so, women were evenly split, with 44% calling themselves “pro-choice.”
The real gap is by education and religion. Sixty percent of non-religious people call themselves “pro-choice,” and fifty-eight percent of post-graduates do. The fight over abortion is likelier to resonate with these voters than with women per se. But the “war on secular post-graduates” just doesn’t have the same ring.
Even as he stakes out the outer edge of the abortion debate, the president sounds soothing. He has said he wants to discourage the practice. Uh-huh. He is as serious about discouraging abortion as he was about opposing gay marriage up until a few months ago. Which is to say laughably disingenuous. How many other things does the president want to discourage but not restrict in any fashion and to fund with federal dollars?
The fact is that the right to abortion is at the heart of contemporary liberalism. Roe v. Wade is liberalism’s Great Writ. Nancy Pelosi considers the right to abortion more sacrosanct than the First Amendment. She would never tamper with or restrict the former; she wants to amend the latter to allow for more campaign-finance regulations.
If NARAL ever honored Todd Akin, it would be entirely tongue-in-check. The man really deserving its boundless gratitude is President Obama. He believes extremism in defense of the widest possible access to abortion is no vice.
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. |
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