By Dave Andrusko
This week a friend passed along the transcript from a New York Times podcast—“Why the Left is losing on abortion”—in which Michael Barbaro of the Times interviewed Ilyse Hogue, President of NARAL Pro-Choice America. As is so often the case, there is only time here to highlight just a portion of what came out. Please read the full transcript here.
Barbaro occasionally drops the “us” word to let listeners know that he is with the “pro-choice” movement. But to his great credit, he asks Hogue genuinely tough questions, the kind that were conspicuously absent last night at Joe Biden’s cozy town hall.
As a starting point, allow me to combine Hogue’s initial observations with her painfully dramatic presentation of the Abortion Industry as the savior of American democracy. She tries to make the argument that pro-lifers in the states don’t play fair; they bent the rules. So goes so far as to say “one side”—us— is “undemocratic, if not anti-democratic.”
Yowza.
But while Barbaro doesn’t’ directly contest that melodramatic and inaccurate assessment, in more than one place he says something like this:
You’re saying that conservatives are using the Supreme Court to do what they couldn’t do legislatively. But wouldn’t the right say that that’s what the left also did with Roe v. Wade? It’s just that the right has been doing it better than the left over the past few years?
Hogue, in response, reaches for one of the most ludicrous off all pro-abortion talking point: that pro-lifers and/or those determined that the Supreme Court stop being a super-legislature have tons of money. This, of course, is so preposterous as to be laughable. It is the pro-abortion “living Constitution” set that weighs its money by the ton.
Barbaro chooses simply to respond:
But doesn’t that just mean that the right is doing it more effectively or better?
The conversation goes around and around and around on that point. (More about that in a moment.)
A lot of the discussion has to do with whether (in Barbaro’s words) there has been an “overreliance on the security of Roe v. Wade.” In other words, pro-abortionists didn’t put the kind of time and effort into the states they did at the federal level.
(Near the end she tells Barbaro that pro-abortionists are getting their act together at the state level.)
Implicit in most of Hogue’s answers is not only that the pro-abortion side is the protector of democracy, but that it is only dark cabals that account for pro-life victory after pro-life victory at the state level. Check out this self-pitying observation that comes at the very end:
You know, ultimately, if our biggest sin is a deep belief in the power of democracy to come up with good outcomes that benefit the majority of American people in all of our complications, in all of our beautiful diversity, I’ll take that sin. We have to get better at actualizing it, or else we will lose everything we hold dear.
But Hogue’s kind of “democracy” is handed down from on high by the Media Elite, the George Soroes, the leadership of the Democrat party, and the Abortion Industry. Their piles of money and their increasing eagerness to suppress social media is a blatant attempt to stifle genuine democracy, that which comes from the people: from the bottom up, not dictated top-down.
Barbaro keenly understands that his party stands for abortion on demand. Period. That puts them at odds with the vast majority of the American people.
When Hogue casually talks about passing sweeping federal legislation, Barbaro points out this would be hugely controversial. (This doesn’t get discussed, but the kind of legislation they are talking about is a series of sweeping pro-abortion policies and directives that would wipe out all protective laws at the federal level and hunt down any state legislatures brave enough to pass protective legislation.”)
Hogue blithely responds, “I can hardly think of anything less controversial than wanting to codify Roe through federal statute.”
That tone-deaf, strident pro-abortion advocacy is a major explanation of “Why the Left is losing on abortion.”
That and your unfailing determination to protect unborn children and their mothers.