Just when I thought I was out – they pulled me back in!

I thought I was going to make this, my 75^th post, about something light and fun.  Then I looked at my Twitter feed.  Mistake! 

In an effort to see more than one side of the issues – even when I’m absolutely certain I’m right – I do follow the tweets of a few select righties.  One of these is Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council.  I see very little evidence that the FRC does anything that marginally qualifies as research, but Tony is an outspoken conservative, so I figure a lot of Fox-ies are being molded by his opinions.  I call him Tony because even though he says some of the most awful and ludicrous things I’ve ever heard, he has that engaging Opie Taylor quality that makes him seem like he has a soul.  I’ve been a crypto-fan since I heard him say that none of his kids could ever be gay because he’d “raised them right.”  Who knew he was a comedian?

Today Tony posted a big wet kiss to Cathy and Austin Ruse for their piece “On the 40^th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade” in The Human Life Review.  The article starts “As January 22, 2013, nears, abortion defenders will be tempted to gloat. After 40 years, Roe v. Wade still stands.”

Gloat?  Gloat?  Are they serious?  Can they expect anyone with a brain to read on in anything but incredulity?  Who thinks that any person – whether they support abortion rights or don’t – gloats at the thought that any woman would feel the need turn to abortion?  When did the so-called “pro-lifers” (I will always enclose that title in quotes because it’s such a misnomer) decided that those who don’t stand with them are all sociopaths whose ultimate aim is “on demand” pregnancy termination with all the pomp and circumstance of ordering a DVD from Netflix?

I remember having a talk with my mother years ago when our social policy conversations usually devolved into right-left shouting matches.  My family have never been joiners, so we’ve generally declared ourselves as proud independents.  Nevertheless, Mom and Dad were always pretty conservative.  Add to that the fact that Mom was raised Catholic and it wasn’t difficult to imagine what her stance on abortion would be.  But she surprised me.  Once again, I gave her too little credit for having lived in the real world.

“I don’t believe it in and I don’t want to pay for it,” she said.  “But I don’t ever want us to go back to back-alley abortions.”  To my mind that put her solidly in the center-right of the issue – with or near most other Americans.

There’s a long, long distance from making no allowance for a woman to terminate a pregnancy under any conditions to allowing for drive-through D and Cs.  The thing is, there are people – a lot of them – who support the first stance, while virtually none support the second.    Virtually no one on the pro-choice side trivializes the life of any child or its mother.  Conversely, there are many on the side of absolute no – many of them men, by the way – who have deemed that when she becomes pregnant, a woman moves into a new realm in which she surrenders some of the most important rights that we normally hold to be self-evident.  But these people are only concerned with the babies these women carry until they are born.  After that, the kids are on their own.

If those who are “pro-life” are going to fight abortion to the end they need to follow through, to adopt the old adage that if you save a person’s life, you are responsible for them until the end of their days.  That means supporting mothers who go to term without the economic wherewithal to support their children, enhanced public school programs, gun safety programs and whatever else is needed to create successful adulthood.  It’s easy enough to picket a Planned Parenthood facility and then go home in time for dinner; it’s quite another to make certain that the human beings you’ve ensured are brought into the world have everything they need to become happy, thriving, contributing members of society.

If the “pro-lifers” have the conviction, they need to have the guts to go all the way.  That’s twenty-some years, kids.

Think about it.