By Dave Andrusko
Yesterday I wrote about two dazzlingly insightful analyses of a new book that documented the immense (and horrific) impact of sex-selective abortion which have caused the deaths of an estimated 163 million unborn females.
Both Ross Douthat and Jonathan Last understood the limitations of journalist Mara Hvistendahl’s book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” (she is pro-abortion and worried about “endangering” the right to abortion). But there is so much in the book that on the whole “Unnatural Selection” is must reading.
No sooner—literally—than I finished writing the post than an individual wrote to National Right to Life asking that we pay attention to pieces like…. Last’s! Evidently although raised in a household and a part of the country not known for its pro-life sentiments, our correspondent “became more and more anti abortion as the years passed.” His point was we need to publicize our cause more with articles like Last’s (“The War against Girls”) than with “gore.”
Two quick points. First, since its beginnings in the late 1960s’s National Right to Life has always appealed to both the head and the heart. As it happens, the closest thing to “gore” that National Right to Life News has produced in the 30 years I’ve been editor was a photo from a grand jury report that culminated in abortionist Kermit Gosnell being charged with eight counts of murder. But visually uncompromising photos do have a time and a place (there was no blood or mangled body parts in the photo of the baby that was reportedly born alive and then killed when allegedly Gosnell slit his neck with surgical scissors); but it does require discretion and an acute sensitivity to your audience.
Second, our correspondent’s larger point, I think, was that no matter where you are in general on abortion, executing hundreds of millions of unborn children simply because they are female goes beyond the pale for almost anyone but the most ideologically-driven pro-abortionist. And once people are revolted by that, it can begin the process that leads to the question, “If I am against this, what other kinds of abortions in what other circumstances am I also against?”
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