From The American Conservative, an essay sympathetic to the right-to-life movement finds it trapped in an abusive marriage to the Republican Party, divided between incrementalism and calls for a "culture of life," and fearful that limited legislative gains will be lost in the Obama years:
As a political movement focused on jurisprudence, activism, and
ballot initiatives, the pro-life movement has obtained modest
restrictions on abortion that have helped to reduce its incidence in
America by nearly 25 percent since 1990. The movement has also limited
the moral coercion involved in abortion by restricting the use of tax
dollars for the procedure with the Hyde Amendment and protecting
pro-life doctors with conscience laws. Yet these hard-fought successes
are jeopardized by the new administration’s promise to undo them all
with the Freedom of Choice Act.
As a conservative social force, restoring the habits of the
“culture of life,” the pro-life movement is failing. While teenage
illegitimacy is down, overall illegitimacy is climbing quickly. Taboos
against premarital sex have long vanished. The sexual revolution is
advancing to redefine the family in law. Medical scientists largely
ignore the movement’s moral objections to embryo research.
For many pro-lifers, there is no separating the two sides of the
debate. Last year Kristi Burton led a campaign in Colorado to extend
the legal definition of person to include the unborn from the moment of
fertilization—a liberal, civil-rights based approach that would
criminalize most abortions. The initiative received just 27 percent of
the vote. But Burton appeared at Washington conferences throughout the
week of the march to sell other activists on her strategy because it
provided opportunities to reach people personally. She has heard from
dozens of Colorado women who decided not to terminate their pregnancies
as a result of her campaign. Burton says, “We put the truth out there,
and people’s lives were changed. Lives were saved.”
The internal divisions of the pro-life movement between conservative
and liberal approaches can be difficult to untangle. The strident
American Life League, which champions Burton’s strategy, is generally
considered ultra-conservative, even as it makes “nondiscrimination” and
“equality” its primary goals. Meanwhile, the more moderate-seeming
incrementalists advocate a conservative, law-and-order approach to the
issue, arguing for parental-consent laws and gradually building legal
consensus for other restrictions on abortion.
In addition to these internal contradictions and turf battles,
pro-lifers are stymied by a complicated, perhaps abusive, relationship
with Republicans. The putatively pro-life party hasn’t delivered the
goods. Shaun Kenney, the executive director of American Life League,
complains, “We had a Republican White House and Republican Congress and
the government is still funding Planned Parenthood? After Bush picked
Harriet Miers, his popularity never got above 40 percent because he
promised pro-life judges.” He insists that pro-lifers are committed to
only one goal: “The sole issue is this: we want abortion ended. That’s
it. All other issues boil down to practical insignificance.”
But Kenney’s own political analysis reveals that even the most
committed pro-life activists are rarely single-issue voters. Asked
whether Bush’s unpopular handling of the economy or foreign policy
could have grievously hurt the GOP and indirectly set the pro-life
movement back, Kenney avers that the “people who didn’t like the war
always opposed the president.” If the war caused his unpopularity,
Kenney argues, “then the surge, which is a wild success, should have
reversed that.” Further, Kenny admits it was understandable that some
pro-life legislation was not passed because “obviously, the war on
terror takes precedence.”
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