The Kids Are All Right
good news on the pro-life front
Posted by Rebecca Teti
in News
on Monday, October 31, 2011 10:00 AM
Amidst news reports on battles & skirmishes, it can be difficult to see what’s happening in the larger conflict.
Here’s a heartening article about the long-term success of the pro-life movement.
You may or may not agree with some of the political assumptions, but you’ll like this news:
In 2011 alone, 24 states have enacted 52 new restrictions on abortion. Five now require an ultrasound before an abortion, two insisting that the screen be viewable by the mother. Four bar abortions after the baby is able to feel pain (at approximately 20 weeks). Eight have opted out of Obamacare. Five ban abortions by webcam (in which a doctor, not in person but videoconferencing with the mother, prescribes pills to induce abortion). Six trimmed or eliminated funds for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. Texas led with a $64 million cut.
And this. Among three pro-life trends author Fred Barnes notes is how pro-life our rising generation has become:
The under-30 cohort was the most pro-choice in the 1970s, second most in the 1980s and 1990s. Now they’re “markedly less pro-choice” than any other age group, scholars Clyde Wilcox and Patrick Carr have written. “Clearly, something is distinctive about the abortion attitudes of the Millennial Generation of Americans.”
What’s interesting is that young people are pro-life in spite of not being particularly religious or conservative:
Millennials haven’t grown more religious, politically conservative, or queasy about gay rights. Nor do they go out of their way to vote for pro-life candidates. But they tend to see abortion as a human rights violation. Thus their resistance to abortion is gradually increasing.
The other positive trends Barnes catalogs are the explosion of crisis pregnancy centers and new pro-life groups. Read all about it.
On another note, Barnes suggests that being pro-marriage has become the “unacceptable” cause, and this has deflected attention from the abortion fight, to the benefit of pro-lifers.
Perhaps the mainstream media are simply incapable of covering more than one social issue at a time. For the moment, the conflict over gay marriage and gays in the military is monopolizing media coverage, TV and print alike. Abortion is barely an afterthought.
There’s an upside to this for the pro-life movement, a benefit of benign neglect. Foes of gay rights are now seen by the press as fighting the bad war, roughly analogous to Vietnam. Pro-lifers are waging the good war, like World War II. “You get much less grief fighting against abortion than you do fighting to preserve traditional marriage,” says Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List.
That would be a difficult proposition to prove, but it’s intriguing. What do you make of it?
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