Let me start by stating that I hate abortion.
It is a loathsome procedure and no woman should ever need to
have one.
Having said that, until women stop being victims of sexual
coercion, rape and abuse, until no woman’s life is ever endangered by a
pregnancy, until special education is fully funded for children with birth
defects, until adoption becomes less cumbersome and costly, and until our
social safety net is so strong that no woman facing an unplanned pregnancy falls
into abject poverty or is kicked out of her home, abortion will continue to
exist. Making it illegal will not stop it.It will just push it back to shady, unregulated practice.
So why does one party have a “Pro-Life” plank and another
have a “Pro-Choice” plank?
To get your vote. Neither party has any intent of fully
accomplishing those planks. If you have ever attended any district or state convention, you know that votes on the platform are made after the
candidates are endorsed and after most delegates, beyond die-hard ideologues,
have gone home. Many candidates never
read the entire platform and only a few feel morally obliged to
support every plank.
The Republicans had a supposedly pro-life president,
Congress and conservative Supreme Court majority for four years and failed to
make abortion illegal. Instead they passed tax cuts for the wealthy, started a
war in the Middle East based on false information, allowed our streets to be
invaded by deranged people with semi-automatic weapons, failed to negotiate
prices with the big pharmaceutical companies for taxpayer-subsidized Medicare drugs,
and gutted banking regulations, leading to a huge national recession.
Now they want you to believe that a conspiracy theorist and
known tax-dodger and con artist who operates casinos and talks lewdly about women will protect unborn
children. Really? Even the ones that
will be born to illegal immigrants or people on welfare?
Meanwhile, if you believe the Facebook memes, a woman who
has spent 40 years trying to expand access to medical care for women and
children and to lift low-income families out of poverty is a “murderer.” Even
though abortions dropped dramatically during her husband’s administration.
Life is complicated. It can’t all fit on a bumper sticker.
To be truly pro-life requires a commitment to caring for women and children
before AND after birth.
I am pleased that statistics show that abortions have dropped
by half since their peak under the Reagan and Bush I administrations. Whether due to better education, better
access to pre- and post-natal care, better contraception, or better policies, I
can’t say, but it probably wasn’t the result of the planks in either party’s
platform. It was likely because more women
have better options. For that we can all be grateful.
