Posted on 01/23/2013 11:55:04 AM PST by neverdem
Last week America’s abortion giant Planned Parenthood announced that it will be moving away from the slogan “choice” as a way to describe killing a child in the womb.
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards told a press briefing that abortion is “complicated” and that the “pro-choice” label was unacceptably limiting.
That’s the spin. Here’s the truth: The term has become a political loser.
Today more Americans know the science of the developing child and the reality of what abortion does to her and to her mother, and increasingly they refuse to cloak themselves in the propaganda that the abortion industry pushes. Thanks to technology, parents can see the development of their children with their own eyes. I watched the fluttery pulse of my daughter’s heartbeat during an early obstetric ultrasound at just four weeks’ development. The ultrasound most parents see at 20 weeks’ gestation lets them watch their child clasping his hands, sucking his thumbs, yawning, stretching, even smiling.
In 1995 when the Gallup polling organization asked Americans whether they consider themselves “pro-choice” or “pro-life” on abortion, the “pro-choice” label had a wide lead: 56 percent “pro-choice” to 33 percent “pro-life.”
But “pro-choice” has been losing ground ever since. In fact, in 2009 for the first time more Americans identified themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice.” Last year “pro-life” out-polled “pro-choice” by nearly 10 percentage points.
While post-election polls showed the labels polling close again, “choice” has never delivered the tremendous rhetorical cache it once did; hence, the search for a new gimmick.
Planned Parenthood Vice President Dawn Laguens was more candid, worrying out loud that “choice” as a slogan for abortion may sound a bit “frivolous.”
She might want to have a word with Planned Parenthood activist Amy Richards, who told the world (through the vehicle of the New York Times Magazine) that she paid an abortionist to kill two of her three unborn children not because she had to, but because she wanted to.
Richards cited, among other things, her desire not “to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.”
In fact, unwanted lifestyle changes is plenty justification for a legal abortion under Roe v. Wade. The Court ruled that abortion must be permitted for any reason a woman chooses until the child becomes viable; after viability, an abortion must still be permitted if an abortion doctor deems the abortion necessary to protect a woman’s “health,” defined by the Court in another ruling issued the same day as “all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age – relevant to the well-being of the patient.”
As journalist David Savage of the Los Angeles Times reported, the Supreme Court has created an “absolute right to abortion” under which “any abortion can be justified.”
And therein lays the problem that Cecile Richards and her comrades face, and that no army of PR wizards or focus groups can change.
It will be interesting to watch Planned Parenthood try to hide it.
Cathy Cleaver Ruse, Esq. is Senior Fellow for Legal Studies at the Family Research Council.
So what’s the new slogan? “Just Do It”?
Mitt Romney ran ads describing the importance of preserving abortion “options”, is that going to be the new language of the pro-abortion movement?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/magazine/lives-when-one-is-enough.html
Let's not overthink this. Choice involves options. Every live birth represents a bad choice and a failure for PP, Democrats and other liberals.
It's a cult that worships death.
They are leaving “choice” and moving into obligation. It is not my choice whether I should pay for an abortion, I am now obligated through health care premiums to do so. Next it will be our duty to abort the sickly ones, and the excess population.
These are the same people and org who tell kids to just do it, and if they have HIV/AIDS that they do not have to tell their “partners” first if they don’t want to.
I am serious.
PLANNED MURDERHOOD
I’m a grown man, military vet, and my wife and I are having a really tough time having kids. I almost cried reading that. :(
Part of their problem is that liberal animal rights groups like PETA have made animals so sacred, that PP sets it self up as a hypocrite with the choice meme. You can’t scream about killing a pregnant dog and all her puppies, and then call killing a human baby ‘a choice’ without looking like a fool.
I’d say that would be about right. They’re dropping “pro-choice” because it sounded too neutral and accomodating.
The abortionists clearly know they’re in charge now and don’t even need to call themselves “pro” anything, because they’re government policy.
Maybe something like,
What-everr!
What-everr!
I'll do what I want!!
</Eric Cartman>
Something like that?
So they can get back to their original purpose of thinning out the herd of negroes, physical and mental defectives and other inferiors without having to use the beard of "hoice".
So they can get back to their original purpose of thinning out the herd of negroes, physical and mental defectives and other inferiors without having to use the beard of "choice".
Probably something more like Zero’s rhetoric on gun control and the budget: “We need balanced, commonsense solutions.” Then he proposes a hard-left gun confiscation bill and infinite spending and power to spend.
Planned Parenthood was never about choice. They were always about providing as much pro-abortion propaganda as possible—preferably before girls could ever think about getting pregnant—and then selling abortion.
Choice implies that the chooser is aware of all of the facts and options surrounding the choice; the abortion purveyors use the cloak of ignorance to sell their service.
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