Saturday, January 08, 2005
Pro-Birth
Pro-birth
I get emails:
I wanted to pass on a term that I heard a Benedictine nun use when she was being interviewed on Bill Moyers' PBS show "Now." She accused those evangelicals who touted "pro-life" positions of actually being "pro-birth" only because they abandoned responsibility for maintaining infrastructure for deteriorating schools, health care, etc.--as well as ignoring the plethora of war dead, which always includes so many children. I've been struggling for a term for so-called pro-lifers who look the other way on war, post-natal care, social services, death penalty, and other life and death issues.
Pro-birth. That does the trick.
And it's not even a nasty name!
By the way, all this talk of taking abortion off the table for 2008 by abandoning our support of choice as a Party is exactly why the Republicans are killing us -- because our leadership lacks the cojones and creativity to realize that over half of Americans support choice and it is a winning and deeply important issue and we just need to frame it better. Howard Dean actually does an amazing job of this. I think Dean's frame would play well all over the country even in the south. Check him out on Meet the Press:
I have long believed that we ought to make a home for pro-life Democrats. The Democrats that have stuck with us, who are pro-life, through their long period of conviction, are people who are the kind of pro-life people that we ought to have deep respect for. Not only are they pro-life, which, I think, is a moral judgment--I happen to be strongly pro-choice, as a physician--but they are pro-life more moral reasons. They also, if they're in the Democratic Party, are real pro-life. That is, they're pro-life not just for unborn children. They're pro-life for investing in children's programs. They're pro-life for helping small children and young families. They're pro-life in making sure adequate medical care happens to children. That's what you so often lack on the Republican side. They beat the drums about being pro-life but they forget about life after birth. And so I do embrace pro-life Democrats. I think we want them in our party. We can have a respectful dialogue, and we have to stop demagoguing this issue.
Isn't that an amazing example about how we should be talking about the Abortion issue? What we don't need to be doing is electing a Pro-birth DNC chair like former Indiana Congressman Tim Roemer to go along with our pro-birth Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. What an embarrassment.
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