Abortion foes take graphic approach
• Rick Perry’s voice softens when he talks about the joy he gets from looking at his iPad and seeing “that 20-week picture of my first grandbaby.” Marco Rubio says ultrasounds of his sons and daughters reinforced how “they were children — and they were our children.” Rand Paul recalls watching fetuses suck their thumbs. And Chris Christie says the ultrasound of his first daughter changed his views on abortion.
If they seem to be reading from the same script, they are.
With help from a well-funded, well-researched and invigorated anti-abortion movement, Republican politicians have refined how they are talking about pregnancy and abortion rights, choosing their words in a way they hope puts Democrats on the defensive.
The goal, social conservatives say, is to shift the debate away from the “war on women” paradigm that has proved so harmful to their party’s image.
Democrats were jolted by the latest and perhaps most disruptive effort yet in this line of attack by activists who want to outlaw abortion: surreptitiously recorded video of Planned Parenthood doctors casually discussing how they extract tissue from aborted fetuses.
It took Hillary Rodham Clinton several days to respond to the uproar the videos created. When she finally did late last week, she called the videos part of a deliberate and “concerted attack” on wo m e n’s rights, and pointed back to Planned Parenthood, which she said had already apologized for the tone of one of the doctors who were recorded.
It is unclear whether the new offensive will succeed in crippling Planned Parenthood, a provider of across-the-board women’s health services that has long been a target of conservatives for the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding it receives. Democrats like Clinton have so far not wavered.
But with the presidential campaign revving up, Democrats and abortion rights supporters are bracing for a sustained, sophisticated and co-ordinated effort to force a debate on the uncomfortable moral and ethical questions that abortion raises.
“The out-of-sight, out-ofmind mantra that propelled the pro-choice movement for decades is forever gone,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who has been hired by conservative candidates, anti-abortion groups and the Republican National Committee to help conservatives sharpen their message on the issue.
Planned Parenthood is now struggling to explain a legal aspect of its practice that has gone largely unnoticed — procuring tissues from aborted fetuses for medical research — in a crisis that shows no signs of abating. The activist behind the videos, David Daleiden, has said he has enough covertly recorded footage for perhaps a dozen videos that he could release, one a week, for the next few months. Planned Parenthood has told Congress that it believes the next instalments could have a racial element to them, with its employees possibly discussing the different characteristics of the extracted fetal tissue based on race.
Abortion opponents hope the videos will provoke people to consider the humanity of the unborn, much like discussing ultrasounds can — albeit in a much more jarring and graphic way. Conway, the Republican pollster, calls this a “shock the conscience, warm the heart” approach.
The potential for the issue to be a factor in the 2016 presidential election is real. All the Republican candidates who are currently in the upper tier strongly oppose abortion rights, unlike in 2008
and 2012.