Article

I liked it. And, no, it's not biased. A couple of quotes from the article.

“Because there’s a Democratic majority in Congress and the president is pro-choice,” says Nancy Keenan, the current director of NARAL, “it sometimes gets lost how truly numerically challenged we are.” That’s especially true for people in New York City, where access to abortion is plentiful and unconstrained. But it’s a very ambivalent pro-choice nation we live in. The idea that a bunch of pro-life rogue wingnuts have hijacked the agenda and thwarted the national will is a convenient, but fanciful, belief.

If forced to choose, Americans today are far more eager to label themselves “pro-life” than they were a dozen years ago. The youngest generation of voters—those between the ages of 18 and 29, and therefore most likely to need an abortion—is the most pro-life to come along since the generation born during the Great Depression, according to Michael D. Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover, who got granular data on the subject from Pew Research Center. Crisis Pregnancy Centers, dedicated to persuading women to continue their pregnancies, now outnumber the country’s abortion providers, who themselves are a rapidly aging group (two-thirds are over 50, according to a National Abortion Federation study from 2002). In the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller this year, the Senate couldn’t even pass a resolution condemning violence against abortion providers.

NARAL’s Nancy Keenan likes to say that abortion’s biggest defenders right now are a “menopausal militia”—a rueful, inspired little joke. These baby-boomers, whose young adulthoods were defined by the fight over the right to choose, will soon be numerically overtaken by a generation of twentysomethings who is more pro-life than any but our senior citizens.

They're real in the minds of ardent PC'ers, but they don't really exist.

Nov 30, 2009 -- 3:24PM, amcolph wrote:

You mean like the imaginary bombings of clinics and the imaginary killing of doctors?

They've hijacked the PL movment and politics? I thought they were ostracized from the PL movement, their actions denounced and then were thrown into jail. My mistake.

Maybe even the imaginary use of the abortion issue as an trojan horse for the imaginary fascist politcal agenda of the Religious Right?

Well, someone dropped the "F" bomb. Ignoring the whole fascist quip (Especially since Communist countries have often times banned abortion as well), considering how any current bans on abortion are being done by Democrats, I think you're going to have a hard time equating that to the religious right. Even though it's nice to think otherwise, at least in the House, the number of PL politicians outnumber PC politicians, and a great number of those PL politicians sit on the leftward end of the political spectrum (Relative to the right, anyway).

I wonder where the 'ardent PC'ers' come up with these crazy ideas.

I wonder as well.

Nov 30, 2009 -- 1:06AM, Bei1052 wrote:

NARAL’s Nancy Keenan likes to say that abortion’s biggest defenders right now are a “menopausal militia”—a rueful, inspired little joke. These baby-boomers, whose young adulthoods were defined by the fight over the right to choose, will soon be numerically overtaken by a generation of twentysomethings who is more pro-life than any but our senior citizens.

Those in the younger generation have no firsthand knowledge or experience with the dangers of making abortion illegal.  While many in the "menopausal" stages whose "young adulthoods were defined by the fight over the right to choose" may not agree with abortion, but agree even less with the consequences of making it illegal. 

If you asked, from a moral standpoint, how many people consider themselves "pro-life", you might get a different answer than if you ask from a legal standpoint. 

There are many things in our society today that I find morally tragic.  I do not, however, wish to make them all illegal.  To each their own, and I'm the only one who has to be able to live with myself and my own actions.

Nov 30, 2009 -- 5:37PM, Bei1052 wrote:

Nov 30, 2009 -- 4:07PM, amcolph wrote:

Thrown into jail when caught, but the PL movement--at least, that part of it which is fundamentalist--praises them with faint damns.

And which part of the PL movement would that be?

I am by no means equating the entire PL movement with the religious right--just the part that stinks of it.

So your argument is against the RR then, and not the PL movement. So why mention that in the first place? There will always be individual people within a movement that you don't always like nor agree with.

I bring it to your attention as a matter of public relations.

There are those (I am one, though it does me no credit to admit it) who feel that if morally bankrupt scumbags like James Dobson or Pat Robertson are in favor of a policy, there must be something wrong with it.