By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortion Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fl.)
Her very brief response seemed to come out of left field, and you knew Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s answer to a question about younger women and their, ahem, lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton would be met with an angry response from fellow pro-abortionists.
Interviewed by Ana Marie Cox for a piece in the New York Times Magazine, Wasserman Schultz (D-Fl.) was asked
Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide?
To which Wasserman Schultz responded:
Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.
So, as best I can tell Wasserman Schultz was maintaining that if younger pro-abortion feminists were not as crazy about the former Secretary of State as were older pro-abortion feminists, it was because they had lived their whole lives in a kind of cocoon where the “right” to abortion was a given. That doesn’t necessary follow, but let’s put that aside for a moment.
Those 24 words were sure to stir a hornet’s nest–and they did. Everybody got their two cents in to chastise Wasserman Schultz.
Didn’t she realize she was buying into an “urban legend”? [Kierra Johnson, executive director of something called URGE.] Couldn’t she see that “There are millions of young women and men across the country who would disagree at the idea that they’re apathetic”? [Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.]
And shouldn’t Wasserman Schultz, as chair of the DNC, know that “The young people not only turn out, they turn out bigger, and they vote consistently overwhelmingly for reproductive choice”? [Eleanor Smeal, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation.]
Etc., etc. etc.
The undercurrent of generational rivalry/disagreement in pro-abortion circles is obvious and something we’ve written about on numerous occasions. But there is much more than meets the eye in this particular back and forth.
(By the way Hillary Clinton’s involvement as a national public figure goes back to 1992. As one millennial told a reporter of Clinton, she’s your mother’s candidate. Younger women have a difficult time relating to Clinton.)
For example, accounts of the squabble minimize the shift among younger people in general, women in particular. They are more pro-life than ever. This has nothing to do with complacency but a dramatically different understanding of equality. That is, many younger feminists do not believe equality in every sphere must or should be built on the dead shoulders of their unborn children.
Also, critics of Wasserman Schultz chewed her out for not seeing other evidence of pro-abortion activism among younger women–the “shout your abortion” movement which is intended to remove once and for all the “stigma” of having an abortion, for instance.
But while that might build up pro-abortion esprit de corps, it changes nothing in the wider culture. Our benighted opposition just assumes that by telling enough “stories,” the public will become desensitized to the brutal inhumanity which is pulverizing one’s defenseless unborn child.
The logic of “See? Women have abortions. It happens” presumes that somehow repetition will act like sandpaper and wear away the innate sensitivity that is part of our inheritance as ethical, caring human beings.
There is real irony to the lament that younger women are “complacent” about abortion. If you are a pro-abortionist, you could only wish for complacency if that meant the tide is not turning against you.
But it is.