It Isn't about Defending Women - It's About Preserving the Sacrament of Abortion

Activists Reveal Rigidity by Fighting Coerced Abortion Ban

By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Posted: Friday, February 27, 2009

ARTICLE

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Publication Date: February 26, 2009

Abortion-rights activists frequently accuse their pro-life adversaries of simplistic thinking and ideological rigidity. That charge made more sense 30 years ago, when proponents of legalized abortion brazenly claimed the mantle of defending women while opponents of abortion focused their rhetoric on the rights of the unborn. But that allegation has not aged well. And it is taking a particular beating right now in Missouri, as the state Legislature debates the merits of a proposed ban on coerced abortions.

In one corner of this legislative fight are the supposed anti-choice simpletons: legislators like Rep. Cynthia Davis and Rep. Bryan Pratt, the sponsors of House Bills 46 and 434, and Sen. Rob Mayer, sponsor of the corresponding Senate Bill 264. Their legislation would make it a crime for anyone to knowingly coerce a woman into aborting her child by performing criminal acts against her or her family, assaulting or stalking her, attempting or threatening to harm her baby against her will or without her knowledge, firing or threatening to fire her for failing to abort her baby or revoking or threatening to revoke her scholarship for that reason. The legislation also strengthens informed consent for a pregnant woman by mandating that she be offered an opportunity view an ultrasound of her baby before an abortion and requiring that she receive more complete information about alternatives to abortion.

For an abortion-rights movement predicated on giving women choices, this legislation would seem to be too innocuous to fight. After all, who wants to see a woman make a life-or-death decision for her unborn child without adequate information, only to lament later -- as do the growing ranks of women in the Silent No More Awareness Campaign -- that she did not truly understand what she was choosing? Who wants to deprive a pregnant woman of access to as much information as possible so she can make her decision from a position of strength, knowledge and freedom rather than desperation and ignorance? And does anyone want to defend the right of abusive or manipulative boyfriends, husbands, parents, employers and coaches to bully a woman into aborting her child because her pregnancy inconveniences them?

Odious as this last prospect sounds, it is apparently not repellant enough to deter Missouri's abortion lobby from battling even this modest pro-life legislation. Blasting it as alternately redundant and radical, unnecessary and insulting, the state's so-called defenders of choice are laboring to kill this choice-expanding bill.

As these abortion apologists see it, a woman need not be asked to clarify her consent before undergoing an abortion because she already has become the very model of self-determination simply by walking through the clinic door. The possibility that she might have a boyfriend waiting in the car outside who has promised to punish her if she fails to "fix" her problem, or parents who hounded her all the way to the clinic and prevented her from reaching out to a crisis pregnancy center for help in keeping her baby, does not worry them nearly as much as the possibility that a woman who wants an abortion will be irritated by an offer that she see her baby on a sonogram or get an unwanted update on his development before she aborts him.

Such priorities may seem out of whack, but they hardly are surprising for a movement that has been known to extol the medical virtues of partial-birth abortion and denounce legislation outlawing infanticide. The opposition of abortion-rights zealots to a ban on coerced abortions is yet another sad consequence of their ideological rigidity -- the very simplistic thinking and refusal to acknowledge reality that they ascribe to their opponents but exemplify in themselves.

-- Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.