Welcome to Free Republic. Good try to defend the indefensible.
Last year at a NARAL meeting, "I think that tonight we have to make it clear that we are not going to turn back the clock. There is no overturning of Roe v. Wade... There is no outlawing of a procedure necessary to save a woman's life or health and there are no more cutbacks on population control efforts around the world. We need to take on this President and all of the forces of intolerance on this issue. We need to honestly and confidently and candidly take this issue out to the country and we need to speak up and be proud of what we stand for."
Did you catch that? Not only should abortion be available to all American women, all the time, but it should be used as a population control valve around the world. And this is something we should "be proud of." Not what you'd expect from someone who claims he doesn't like abortion.
And this isn't an isolated comment...
From the Boston Herald on January 23, 2001: "I will not back away from my conviction that international family planning programs are in America's best interests. We should resist pressures in this country for heavy-handed Washington mandates that ignore basic choices that should belong to free people around the globe."
Kerry's support for "international family planning programs" -- a standard euphemism for "abortion" -- is an issue he's advocated for some time. If Kerry is telling the truth about being "personally opposed" to abortion, why is he trying to spread it worldwide?
But perhaps the most outrageous quote comes from the 1994 Congressional record: "The right thing to do is to treat abortions as exactly what they are -- a medical procedure that any doctor is free to provide and any pregnant woman free to obtain. Consequently, abortions should not have to be performed in tightly guarded clinics on the edge of town; they should be performed and obtained in the same locations as any other medical procedure... [A]bortions need to be moved out of the fringes of medicine and into the mainstream of medical practice. And by the same token, if our children are to be safe from the danger of fanaticism, tolerance needs to spread out of the mainstream churches, mosques, and synagogues, and into the religious fringes."
Abortion is simply "a medical procedure"? If that were true, then on what grounds could he possibly be personally opposed to it?
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1166881/posts
Oh, by the way -- the speech I linked on my post? It was provided by James Taranto at Opinion Journal.com's Best of the Web.
The Kerry website has delinked his NARAL speech. I'm sure it's just a glitch. </sarcasm>
-From your superb series of JF'nK quotes-
Kerry is so concerned about protecting children from "danger" that he wants the anti-life practice of true fanatics into the mainstream, where he assumes most people of faith support it and could teach tolerance to the "bigoted fringe".
Last I noticed, the Catholic Church was pretty much mainstream in this country, and the bulk of its members here don't give carte blanche to abortion. (Oh, but Catholic Kerry IS against it too, I forgot...)