In recent years, it has been amply demonstrated that at bottom, the pro-life movement is morally bankrupt. We got more evidence of this this weekend, when the leader of a leading “mainstream” pro-life group admitted that in the long run, she wants to further victimize women who have been sexually assaulted by denying them the option of having an abortion.
Marjorie Dannenfelser is the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which trades on the questionable premise that the noted suffragette was strongly pro-life. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch noticed that on Saturday, Dannenfelser appeared on “Caffeinated Thoughts,” a Christian conservative radio show in Des Moines, to discuss the House’s recent passage of a bill that would ban most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. You may remember that the first attempt to bring up the bill fizzled when several Republican women objected to a provision that would have only allowed victims of rape and incest to get an abortion after 20 weeks if they reported the assault to law enforcement first.
That provision wasn’t in the final bill, much to the chagrin of several pro-life groups who have been behind “personhood” amendments at the state level. Instead, sexual assault victims must show they have either gotten medical treatment or licensed counseling within 48 hours of getting a late-term abortion. The SBA List publicly supported this provision. But Dannenfelser told host Shane Vander Hart that it was “regrettable” that there was any exception for sexual assault victims in the bill at all. However, she had been told that the bill would be DOA if that language hadn’t been included. She then made the following breathtaking declaration:
“Any child at any stage should be protected from conception, and certainly at 20 weeks excepting anyone is just wrong.”
Even when the pregnancy results from a woman being victimized and violated, Marjorie? In case there was any doubt that the answer to that question was “yes” in Dannenfelser’s book, she erased it later in the program, when co-host Brian Myers asked her what it would take to persuade John Boehner and the rest of the Republican House leadership that exceptions for sexual assault victims were “utterly inconsistent with the pro-life position.”
Dannenfelser replied that it would probably take pro-life candidates winning more elections and “being on offense.” In particular, she thinks getting a Republican in the White House will bring an “injection of courage” that will allow pro-life politicians to see the inconsistency of exceptions for sexual assault victims. As she saw it, support for such exceptions is a “political judgment”–but one that had to be made just to get bills like this one passed.
No, Marjorie. Supporting such exceptions isn’t a political judgment. It’s an act of basic decency. These women have already been victimized once, and forcing them to continue a pregnancy resulting from such violation would only victimize them again. In effect, it would tell a woman that she brought this ordeal on herself somehow. You have effectively gone on record as saying that a woman shouldn’t even have the option of an abortion in such degrading circumstances–a position that can only be described as an abomination.
Dannenfelser’s statement comes on the heels of a 10-year-old Paraguayan girl being forced to continue her pregnancy when all available evidence shows that pregnancy was the result of her being victimized by her mother’s boyfriend. Never mind that it would be dangerous, and possibly fatal, to victimize someone in this way at such a young age. Would Dannenfelser be willing to tell this little girl’s mother to her face that “any child at any stage should be protected from conception”?
Then again, I’ve learned not to expect actual decency from the pro-life movement. We are, after all, talking about a movement that gives succor to crisis pregnancy centers that give dangerously inaccurate information to women. We’re talking about a movement that allowed Cheryl Sullenger to get a job at Operation Rescue despite being a convicted clinic bomber, and allowed her to keep her job even though she gave George Tiller’s number to Scott Roeder. And we’re talking about a movement that would force a brain-dead woman to stay on life support if she’s pregnant.
Four years ago, I realized I could no longer identify as a pro-life liberal–a realization that gradually pushed me back to being pro-choice, as I had been for the better part of my life. The pro-life movement isn’t about respect for life at all. It’s about a backdoor attempt to destroy the right to privacy and victimize women. And now one of the most prominent “mainstream” leaders of that movement has tacitly admitted this is the case.
