Sunday, August 31, 2008

From Steven Mosher at Catholic Exchange today

"Already notorious for its unconditional embrace of abortion, the Democratic Party has now managed to adopt a position on the paramount life issue that is, if anything, even more extreme. The new platform adopted in Denver states that the Party “strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.”

Past Democratic Party platforms had managed to at least sound moderate by invoking the formulation, popularized by Bill Clinton, that the party’s goal was to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” The problem arose with the word “rare,” which important elements of the party’s political base seem to have found offensive. It certainly grated on the sensibilities of feminists, the more radical of whom regard abortion not as something to be avoided but as a positive act of liberation from conventional sex roles, a bloody rite of passage into their own largely barren ranks. Even pro-choice feminists of a more moderate persuasion were unhappy at the moral judgment implicit in the call to make abortion “rare.” They may not have regarded abortion as an unmitigated good, but they were certainly unhappy with anyone who suggested that it was in any way unsavory.

The abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was equally unhappy with Ma and Pa... (Continued here.)

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