As I point out in my new book, Abolishing Abortion (due in August from Thomas Nelson/HarperCollins), there is a profound blind spot in the views and policies advocated by many public officials regarding the unborn. Hillary Clinton tops the blindness list. Her attitude toward children in the womb is that they are not welcome to enjoy the basic constitutional protection our nation affords to everyone else’s life.
But then again, Hillary is seeking her party’s nomination for president, and the Democratic Party is affected by the same blind spot so severely that it’s not imaginable that anyone can seriously seek that party’s nomination without being blind to the children in the womb.
Now some will say that, even in political debate, we need to be nice. Particularly in church circles, as we go into the 2016 political cycle, the pleas for ‘civility’ will probably be louder than the pleas for the children in the womb.
But the fact is that civility is not the highest virtue in political discourse. Honesty is. This doesn’t imply that we need to be mean or coarse. But it does imply that when there’s a holocaust going on around us, and an entire political party not only denies it but fosters it, we can’t sit back and pretend that the main thing that matters is that we be nice and non-partisan. Someone has to start sounding the alarm, and it might as well be us.
Interestingly, Cecile Richards, who heads up the largest abortion business in the world (Planned Parenthood), recently made a public call for the need to talk about abortion. Yet the pro-life movement has been making the same call and engaging in the very same effort for decades. What makes the abortion supporters all of a sudden feel the need to talk about abortion? They have never done so before, and they still don’t. All their talks in favor of “abortion rights” speak not about abortion but about choice, freedom, women’s health, constitutional rights, etc. But not once, neither in Cecile Richards’ comments nor in speeches by President Obama or any other abortion supporters will you ever find a description of the abortion procedure.
And when Sen. Rand Paul recently called on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic Party, to answer a question as to whether she thinks it’s okay to abort a baby at 7 pounds in the womb, she failed to directly answer the question. Again, they do not want to talk about abortion; they only want to pretend to be talking about abortion.
The blind spot continues. It is up to us to call for honesty as the highest virtue in political discourse. With legislative proposals now underway to protect children from 20 weeks forward and to protect them from dismemberment abortion, it is a fair and urgent question to ask any public official or any abortion supporter in any profession why dismembering children in the womb should continue to be permitted in our nation.
Frank Pavone is national director of Priests for Life. One can pre-order his book, Abolishing Abortion, at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.