Posted 11:30 PM by Floyd

I am continually astonished by the success of the American abortion lobby. The most visible and vocal of the pro-abortion groups use arguments and propaganda suitable more for feeding persecution fantasies than for changing opinions. Yet access to abortion is unlimited across the land.

At first glance abortion would seem to be a fertile area for compromise. A fetus at, say, two months is tiny, and not recognizable as human. A fetus at the end of term, seven or eight months, could survive independently outside the womb. In my opinion, viewing early term abortion as murder is ludicrous; you might as well feel guilty for slapping on a rubber. Late term abortion, on the other hand, appears to me the cruellest of technicalities: "Hey little guy, I'll bet you wish you could make it out this fifteen centimeters of birth canal, huh? Then you'd be a person with rights!"

Yet the abortion lobby is intransigent. President Bush just signed a law banning late-term abortions. Three federal judges rushed to file injunctions. In the one case I heard about, the judge issued a stay because the legislation did not consider the health of the mother. I wasn't aware that this was a constitutional right, or for that matter was relevant in any other kind of criminal law. (When some nut drowns her kids in the bathtub we don't expect her to go into court and say that murdering her kids was necessary for her health.)

Militant abortionists can also rely on puff pieces from sympathetic journalists -- this piece is an excerpt from tomorrow's Mercury News:

Young take hard-won right to choose for granted
By Sue Hutchison
Mercury News

Erika Jackson is wondering if the events of this month will serve as a wake-up call to her classmates that they're in danger of losing one of their most fundamental rights. Maybe this is what it will take for them to finally get the message.

Jackson, a 27-year-old student at San Jose State and president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance on campus, is getting her group ready to launch an informational blitz on the threat to abortion rights. President Bush supplied the rallying cry last week when he signed the first law banning a specific abortion procedure since the Roe vs. Wade decision granted women the right to abortion in 1973.

Maybe Jackson's classmates don't know that ``partial birth abortion,'' which the new law would ban, is not a medical term but a propaganda phrase. Maybe young women think the ban could never affect their lives.
...

So "partial birth abortion" is not a medical term? What on earth does that have to do with anything? The president, senators, and representatives deal with the federal legal code; other common legal terms such as "homicide" and "assault" are not medical terms either. Let me know if Bush et al agitate to teach at Stanford Medical School.

Of course what really sticks in the "Feminist Majority Leadership" craw is not that "partial birth abortion" is propaganda; what offends them is that it is effective propaganda. (So was the locution "killing fields," which described Khmer Rouge death camps. Shall we abandon that phrase because "field" is not an agricultural term?)

Incompetent argumentation by pro-abortion forces has been the norm for at least a decade. Consider the venue of bumper stickers. The only pro-abortion slogan that I found compelling was "US out of my uterus". Other popular catch phrases included:

• "If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?" We do trust mothers with their children -- but if they kill them, we prosecute them. This would be a fine slogan if pregnant women were kept under 24-hour watch for fear that they would visit an abortionist. The anti-abortion riposte -- "it's a child, not a choice" -- was devastating. (The abortion lobby's fanatacism prevents them from making the powerful argument that early term fetuses are not children; they would then be exposed to the counter-argument that partial-birth abortion is equivalent to killing a newborn, and some 0.5% of abortions would be in jeopardy.)
  
• "If men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament." If men got pregnant they would be ... women. This insults women who are anti-abortion, and men who are pro-abortion for that matter. There must be some leftist guideline that if you have the choice between persuading and insulting, choose the insult.
  
• "Every child a wanted child." Surely the most vile of all the pro-abortion slogans. Why not "Every Jew a wanted Jew"?