Kirsten Powers at Daily Beast made a shocking comparison – legislatively speaking – concerning the Gosnell trial and the abortion rights movement in her column today. They’ve become “the NRA of the left," the liberal but pro-life Democrat charges.
To her buddies on the Left, those are meant to be fighting words. There is no greater insult for liberals than to be compared to the National Rifle Association, the nation's oldest civil rights organization founded in 1871.
Powers eviscerated the pro-abort argument in the first two paragraphs, saying how Gosnell’s clinic wasn’t “illegal…it was a licensed medical facility. The state of his clinic was well known: there were repeated complaints to government officials and even the local Planned Parenthood.” But that’s only the beginning.
Towards the end of her column, Powers admits that – as a liberal – she’s for more government regulation of “practically everything,” but is stupefied that when it comes to abortion, pro-abortion rights advocates take a rather laissez faire position.
More and more, the abortion rights community has become the NRA of the left: unleashing their armies of supporters and lobbyists in opposition to regulations or restrictions that the majority of Americans support. In the same way the NRA believes background checks will lead to the government busting down your door to confiscate your guns, the abortion rights movement conjures a straight line from parental consent to a complete ban on abortion.
Now, you may disagree over the rights Powers is juxtaposing in this analysis, but it’s true that just as the political right is vociferous about their Second Amendment rights, the left will do anything to protect the abortion lobby from regulation, which they fear is a slippery slope to eventual abolition of abortion as a legal right.
Of course, the key difference is the right to bear arms is explicitly clear in the U.S. Constitution, while the right to an abortion was read into the text by an activist Supreme Court which saw the right stemming from a "right to privacy" in 1973.
Another criticism would be that, unlike the NRA, abortion lobby groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood oppose any existing regulations on abortion, and would love to see their repeal, whereas the NRA has no objection to convicted felons being deprived the right to buy guns, and the NRA has no objection to the existing background check law for federal firearms licensees (FFLs).
Nonetheless, Powers, a former Democratic operative, should be commended for her courage for calling later-term abortion “legal infanticide.”
In the body of her piece, Powers noted that:
medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her ‘fetus. It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.” She also thinks that life begins at conception.
Concerning the media, she’s disconcerted that:
that so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”
Ms. Powers should tread carefully since she’s acting like a misogynist in the liberal "war on women" fantasyland.
