By Dave Andrusko

As I read many of the reactions, it seemed like the unwillingness of an appeals court panel to reflexively accept a trial judge’s temporary injunction of Texas’s new sonogram law represented a kind of tipping point for a number of pro-abortionists. When a three-judge panel lifted Judge Sam Sparks’s temporary injunction, the unanimous decision exacerbated an already increasingly panicky pro-abortion narrative: they are “under siege.”

How did they reach this conclusion? They simply toted up all the pro-life initiatives passed in the states in 2011, skipped a level-headed analysis, and flew straight to full hysteria. But, to be fair, there is much to be worried about, from their perspective.

One of many examples that could be offered was an analysis produced for the pro-abortion website rhrealitycheck.org by Elizabeth Nash of the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute. Her initial observation is clearly on the money: “By almost any measure, issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011.”

Nash leads off with, but pays no additional attention to, what she calls “Bans”—mostly the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. But they are as much afraid of that law as pro-lifers are encouraged. They worry if the law ever reached the Supreme Court, there could well be five votes to uphold a law which protects from abortion unborn babies who are capable of feeling pain. Which explains why they have not challenged the laws in any of the five states that have enacted the measure: Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama, Idaho, and Kansas.

Another pro-abortion article, written by Amanda Marcotte and Jesse Taylor for The Nation magazine, worries that the step-by-step approach patented by National Right to Life is using the latitude afforded states by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision to gut Roe, leaving a skeletal “right” to abortion that exists but so devoid of substance as to be meaningless. You might say life by a thousand cuts.

But to much/most of the “mainstream press,” this is not a life-and-death struggle but pretty much just a cynical game, a “carnival” to quote Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, writing the week before the annual March for Life.

His basic contention—that pro- and anti-life groups really aren’t all that interested in stopping abortion—is hardly a new charge. Intended to give abortion supporters like Milbank an air of even-handedness, this is a flagrant example of false equivalency. Just look at his own “evidence” which undermines his conclusion.

Milbank starts with “abortion provider Merle Hoffman,” who had just appeared at the National Press Club. She’s peddling a new book—Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom—with an alarmist message: because of the downturn in the economy (quoting Milbank’s characterization) “nearly three-quarters of women ending their pregnancies say they simply can’t afford to have a baby. Hoffman expanded on that trend to forecast a ‘dim future’ for women if a Republican wins the White House: a world of abortion ‘slave states’ and ‘underground railroads’ and ‘pre-Roe reality.’”

The problem (beyond the synthetic hysteria)? Not only is the data she relies on from 2008—before the recession’s impact was felt—but Hoffman came to these global generalizations based on newspaper stories and by taking her own pulse—telling us what supposedly happened at her abortion clinic. (Milbank then segues into a discussion of the various and sundry crimes of greedy pro-lifers, which we’ll return to a second.)

He talks caustically about a series of fundraisers some of the pro-abortion heavy hitters are hosting and comes to the conclusion that neither side is interested in compromise because they have “strong financial incentives to avoid consensus and compromise.” Really?

The lone pro-life example of fundraising is the dinner the March for Life puts on to fund its annual Washington, D.C., rally. Hello?

So what exactly were pro-lifers doing as we approached the 39th anniversary of Roe and Doe? In addition to the March (the fact that 60,000 to 90,000 people will come from around the country somehow gets lost) and the National Right to Life press conference (which he manages to overlook), Milbank talks mostly about those fundraising machines known as ... youth rallies, youth conferences, and prayer vigils!

But not only are both sides in it for the money, both sides have “no time for reason,” Milbank pronounces from his chair on the journalistic equivalent of Mt. Olympus. He’s on to something, just not what he intends.

To take just one example, is it reasonable for tens of thousands of kids to ride on buses all night from hundreds of miles away to pray at a cathedral for unborn babies and their mothers? Naw, he’s right, it deserves nothing more than his dismissive putdown: a “carnival.” Next year Milbank will no doubt draw parallels to Mardi Gras and beach week. What a guy.

But to give him his due, Milbank starts with Hoffman and ends with another excerpt from her Press Club jeremiad. Even he appears stunned at her “full-throated defense of her own abortion (‘I had committed myself to my work’ and didn’t want to be ‘diverted’), coupled with dire warnings about the future of legal abortion (‘relentless attacks . . . will be impossible’). Hoffman likened her defense of the procedure to Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. ‘Abortion is a life-affirming act,’ she said, and ‘abortion is often the most moral choice.’”

Milbank nevertheless dismisses this as nothing more than “Roe week in Washington. (Donate now.),” the kind of posturing you get when the sound of cha-ching has replaced the voice of sincerity. That would seem to perfectly fit Hoffman, a self-made millionaire, and the upper management at Planned Parenthood.