Abortion Issue Escapes Political Closet

By Ken Concannon
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 12/01/05)

From the onset of the great cultural and political divide over abortion, the opposing sides viewed the issue from totally different perspectives. For those of us opposed to legalized abortion it was always about the killing of babies. For those who were in favor of legalized abortion, the issue was individual freedom. The killing babies part was hidden in self denial and euphemisms, which worked for the other side for a very long time.

About 30 years ago, when I lived in New Jersey, a lawyer friend of mine planned to run for the state legislature as a right-to-life Republican. He invited me to meet with him and a couple of political operatives who had been part of the campaign team that won for Richard Nixon his landslide re-election victory in 1972. What they had to say about my friend’s anti-abortion candidacy has served as the conventional political wisdom until this millennium.

They told him that an openly anti-abortion candidate could not be elected to political office, that the abortion issue was a no win issue, that candidates who openly take an anti-abortion stance at best lose as many votes as they gain, and that the anti-abortion issue was basically a fringe issue not worthy of serious political discourse. Not long after that meeting Democrat Jimmy Carter, a man that many right-to-lifers had believed to be opposed to abortion, accepted his party’s Presidential nomination at the 1976 convention by endorsing its pro-abortion platform.

In the years following my lesson in political wisdom the two major political parties would incorporate differing views of abortion into their national platforms (Democrats pro-choice, Republicans pro-life), but Presidential candidates would rarely mention the issue. When the subject did come up, the conventional political wisdom avowed that the Democratic pro-choice position on abortion was the winner and many Democratic Presidential hopefuls who began their political careers as pro-life Democrats – e.g. Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Dennis Kucinich – experienced a Jimmy Carter-like abortion conversion. Pro-life Republicans remained largely silent, preferring to talk about other things.

Times have changed and so has conventional wisdom.

Last year George Bush’s Presidential re-election campaign adopted and frequently repeated the Catholic "culture of life" theme to express his pro-life stance. In the Congressional elections of 2002 and 2004, the issue of abortion was very much on the lips and in the campaign material of pro-life candidates who were not the least bit reluctant to express their pro-life views. Pro-choice opponents, on the other hand, felt obliged to express their personal opposition to abortion while supporting a woman’s right to abort.

In the Presidential re-election campaign and in the overwhelming majority of recent Congressional campaigns pro-life candidates defeated their pro-choice opponents. In the election campaigns recently concluded here in Virginia, pro-life candidates for statewide office, as well as those running for the state legislature, had no problem sharing their pro-life views with voters.

The conventional wisdom has changed so much that in a recent press conference in Washington, D.C., the above-mentioned former President Jimmy Carter, who as an ex-President has been vocal about virtually everything but abortion, took his party to task for "overemphasizing the abortion issue."

"I have always thought it was not in the mainstream of the American public to be extremely liberal on many issues," Carter said. "I never have felt that any abortion should be committed — I think each abortion is the result of a series of errors." The former president even used the "B word," stating that many Democrats, like him, "have some concern about, say, late-term abortions, where you kill a baby [the B word] as it's emerging from its mother's womb."

Recent elections, Carter’s public comments, and the pending battle over Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s Roe vs. Wade position all signify that the long-delayed national debate on abortion has finally begun. Prior to the Roe vs. Wade decision abortion was a matter sometimes debated at the state level. But the Roe decision, combined with the complicity of a secular media that chose to remain silent on the horror of abortion and the use of clever euphemisms by the abortion industry, stifled public discourse on the subject.

Not anymore. Thanks to the Internet, ultra-sound technology, and the decades-long persistence of dedicated pro-lifers, the issue of abortion has come out of the political closet. Those who have been reluctant to speak out on the issue, and those who have only referred to it in euphemisms, will, like Carter, find it find it increasingly more difficult to avoid the "B word." That bodes well for the unborn.

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