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Jewish World Review March 9, 2004 / 16 Adar, 5764

Joel Mowbray

Joel Mobray
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Consumer Reports


Holiday for abortionists — seriously


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | This Wednesday, March 10th, is a holiday with which you may not be familiar, but should be: the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers.

The very fact that there exists such a "holiday" — created in 1996 and co-sponsored by more than twenty major groups, including Planned Parenthood and National Organization for Women (NOW) — says everything you need to know about the "pro-choice" movement today.

Most ordinary Americans who identify themselves as "pro-choice" would be disgusted that abortion providers are being hailed as heroes. Even to people who support keeping the procedure legal, abortion is not something to be glorified.

The National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers, however, cannot be dismissed as something celebrated by fringe elements.

Aside from Planned Parenthood and NOW, it is endorsed by such mainstream "pro-choice" groups as National Abortion Rights Action League and the American Civil Liberties Union. The abortionist appreciation "holiday," according to the web site of the umbrella group that founded it, Refuse and Resist, includes such as activities as "local appreciation day events," and asking people to use their "imagination, creativity and dedication to help create a climate" where abortionists "can hold their heads high."

The Refuse and Resist web site also encourages people to give gifts to their friendly local abortion providers.

So what do you get someone after a long day of collapsing the skulls of unborn children so their tiny bodies fall lifeless out of the uterus? A "breakfast basket of fruit or muffins" is recommended.

Some will complain that I'm making abortionists look worse by highlighting partial-birth abortion, a particularly gruesome procedure.

But that's the thing about abortion. It's always gruesome. It's always violent. The end result is always that an unborn child dies at the hand of the abortionist.

Over the years, most Americans never really had to bother much with the details of abortion. All that changed, though, with the long-running debate over partial-birth abortion.

When the partial-birth abortion issue came to prominence in 1995, support for abortion was at its highest point in nearly two decades. Gallup found that 56% of Americans identified themselves as "pro-choice," compared to only 33% calling themselves "pro-life."

The hard-core abortion supporters preferred the clinical-sounding medical term "dilation and extraction." The public didn't.

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Once Americans were forced to consider the ugly reality of a procedure where full-term babies are partially delivered breech (meaning feet first) so that the brain could be suctioned out, support for abortion — not just partial-birth — plummeted.

Since 2001, roughly the same number of people polled by Gallup identified themselves as "pro-choice" as "pro-life," a seismic shift in public opinion in just six years.

Most Americans now find abortion morally wrong when done in any type of procedure, and only one-third think that ending the life of the unborn child is morally acceptable, according to a Gallup poll released last summer.

Perhaps the most logical explanation is that more and more people recognize the core nature of abortion. Even the most common procedures, such as "suction curettage" (typically performed in the first trimester) or "dilation and evacuation" (usually done in the second and third trimesters), are too horrifying to fathom.

As described by pregnantpause.org, "suction curettage" is where an abortionist inserts into a woman's dilated cervix a tube with a sharp edge on it that "is connected to a suction device, similar to a home vacuum cleaner but much more powerful. Between the sharp edge and the force of the suction, the developing baby is torn apart and the pieces sucked out through the tube."

Even more gruesome is "dilation and evacuation." From pregnantpause.org: "A seaweed-based substance called 'laminaria' is inserted into the cervix to dilate it, usually overnight. The next day forceps with sharp metal teeth are inserted and used to twist and tear off the unborn baby's limbs and remove them piece-by-piece. The head is usually too large to be removed whole and must be crushed."

It's not difficult to see why the more the details of abortion creep into the public debate, the more pro-life Americans become. It's only natural. Abortion's "ok" — as long as it is just a "choice."

When people are forced to think about the details inherent in an abortion, however, fewer and fewer people support "choice" when they realize what that "choice" actually entails — and fewer still will celebrate the abortionist "holiday."

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JWR contributor Joel Mowbray is the author of "Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Endangers America's Security". Comment by clicking here.

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