By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortion Hillary Clinton
A few hours from now, Hillary Clinton will address the Democratic National Convention. She will be wildly applauded, not only for the same reason any party’s presidential nominee would be lauded, but because she will be the first woman ever to run as a major party’s nominee.
Metaphorically, we will be told, you can almost hear the glass falling. We will hear numerous iterations of how Clinton is good for women, good for the country, and good for the world.
Pro-lifers, of course, dissent. She is not good for unborn women, not good for our nation which is divided on abortion and nowhere in the vicinity of Clinton’s abortion Über alles philosophy, and certainly not good for unborn babies whose nation’s protect their littlest members and whose laws are in Clinton’s cross-hairs.
Other pro-lifers have written about the Democrats’ embrace of unlimited, publicly funded abortion, led by Hillary Clinton who has made the elimination of the Hyde Amendment a priority. Here’s National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru recent take on Clinton and her party:
During the Obama years, liberalism became more aggressive in its support of abortion. Hillary Clinton’s campaign reflects this new attitude. If she is elected, her administration is likely to reach a new extreme in the depth of its commitment to keeping abortion legal, expanding subsidies for it, and insulating these policies from democratic review
Referring to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the first two Democrats elected president post Roe v. Wade, Ponnuru keenly observes that they “took pains to project ambivalence about abortion.” In the case of Clinton, that “ambivalence” was all for show.
To show you how far the Democrats have come in nominating Hillary Clinton, consider that
After John Kerry lost the 2004 election to George W. Bush, many Democrats, including Kerry himself, blamed the loss in part on the perception that their party was too identified with abortion.
For a brief moment, Democrats were quasi-hospitable to pro-life Democrats. In 2005 even then Senator Clinton called abortion “a sad, even tragic decision.” But note! That never kept her from toeing the extremist pro-abortion line, including voting as often as she could against a ban on partial-birth abortion.
Indeed in that same 2005 speech, as Ponnuru notes, Clinton did “not give an inch on policy” and “implicitly compared pro-lifers to the Communist dictators of China: Supposedly, using the law to forbid abortion, as in pre-1973 America, is just like using the law to mandate it.”
But the semblance of caution, or defensiveness, about abortion is long since a thing of the past. Clinton is busy opposing a law that would end abortions of pain-capable unborn children, pledging her Supreme Court appointees would support abortion, and libeling pro-life politicians. To quote Ponnuru quoting Clinton
Last August she said that pro-life politicians had “extreme views about women”: “We expect that from some of the terrorist groups, we expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world.”
Ponnuru argues that Clinton would be no more pro-abortion a president than Obama which, I would argue, is flatly and demonstrative wrong. But Ponnuru is on the money when he observes
Her support for abortion could, however, be more consequential than his. She would have an opportunity he has been denied: a chance to appoint Supreme Court justices who would tilt the law further in favor of abortion. (Obama replaced two pro-Roe justices with two other pro-Roe justices.) And she would be leading the most pro-abortion governing party our country has ever seen.
Our opposite numbers at Planned Parenthood and NARAL and EMILY’s List fully grasp that they could not possibly have a candidate more in harmony with them than Hillary Clinton. She is their dream candidate.
She is also a nightmare for unborn babies.