By Dave Andrusko
Helen M. Alvaré
Granted, I only scratched the surface of the 2,600+ responses to “Why Pro-lifers keep fighting abortion,” but I think I get the drift. Message: “drop dead, prolifers.” Hey, that’s okay. Helen M. Alvaré and Meg T. McDonnell no doubt anticipated a hailstorm of withering blowback to their opinion piece in the Washington Post. After all, pro-lifers are supposed to give up and, besides, didn’t they write there are eight factors keeping abortion entrenched and only three softening the ground around the footers?
It’s easy to list, alas, those sober realities which make abortion so difficult to eradicate. Everything from the breadth and depth of the abortion “right”; to the inertia that makes overturning a Supreme Court decision so formidable; to how “Abortion seem[s] to suck all of the oxygen out of the room on the subject of women’s equality and freedom.”
But Alvaré, who is a law professor and president of Chiaroscuro Institute, and McDonnell, who is the Institute’s communications director, outline three important counter-strengths, if you will, that offer pro-lifers real reason for hope. That they are not new tells us only that more and more people on both sides of the issue understand them to be true.
Our Movement, they say, is “not dead yet” because “science and technology have been very good to us over the past several decades.” The following sentence is very intriguing and very true: “Embryology, genetics, neurology, not to mention ultrasound technology — they are probably responsible for the fact that none of the abortion-rights Web sites bothers any longer to attack the humanity of the unborn child.”
Secondly, they contrast the humdrum, boy-is-it-boring “privacy” argument (even the pro-abortionists readily concede it’s a threadbare argument so old its seams are showing) with the understanding that abortion is a human rights issue that “just never gets old.”
And third, the bad guys have the money but we have the young people whose “infectious enthusiasm” energizes the entire Movement.
New arguments? No, but well put and a great reminder that there is an inexorability to Roe’s reversal, regardless of the defenses erected around it these past 40 years.
(You can read their essay at www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pro-life-movement-wont-stop-fighting-abortion/2013/03/01/94083902-6cd2-11e2-bd36-c0fe61a205f6_story.html.)