Pro-Abortion Leader Concedes Defeat

In a shocking concession to the pro-life movement, Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice, is coming to the conclusion that the recently departed Dr. Benard Nathanson came to years ago -- abortion kills a human life.

Unlike Nathanson, the rabidly pro-abortion Kissling isn’t coming to the light. In fact, Kissling is wallowing in the very sad reality that most Americans do not share her views on the sanctity of human life, and desperately is trying to think of a way for the abortion industry to survive, according to the Washington Post:

The "pro-choice" brand has eroded considerably. As recently as 1995 it was the preferred label of 56 percent of Americans; that dropped to 42 percent in 2009 and was 45 percent in 2010, according to Gallup polls. And abortion rights are under attack in Congress. The House passed a bill on Friday that would strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, one of the most important providers of reproductive health services for poor women. Another proposed House measure would make it impossible to buy private insurance covering abortion. Anti-choice Republicans are so secure that Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, a leader of this wing, has introduced an act which will allow hospitals to deny an abortion even if the pregnant woman's life is at risk. Meanwhile, 29 governors are solidly anti-abortion, while 15 states passed 39 laws, most of them restrictive, relating to abortion in 2010 alone.

Pro-choice advocates have good reason to oppose legislation that restricts abortion in any way, but unfortunately we're not going to regain the ground we have lost. What we must do is stop holding on to a strategy that isn't working, and one that is making the legal right to abortion more vulnerable than ever before.

In short, more and more Americans are coming to the conclusion that abortion is a barbaric act, and as abortion has become more commonplace, more Americans are coming to grips with the awful damage left behind in the wake of an abortion.

Of course, Kissling is very much aware of the damage abortion does.

…and she’s urging the abortion industry to change tactics.

We can no longer pretend the fetus is invisible. We can no longer seek to banish the state from our lives, but rather need to engage its power to improve women's lives. We must end the fiction that an abortion at 26 weeks is no different from one at six weeks.

These are not compromises or mere strategic concessions, they are a necessary evolution. The positions we have taken up to now are inadequate for the questions of the 21st century. We know more than we knew in 1973, and our positions should reflect that.

The fetus is more visible than ever before, and the abortion-rights movement needs to accept its existence and its value.

Rub your eyes and read that twice.

So how does Kissling believe the abortion industry should accept the baby’s “existence and virtue” based on these gripping visuals? Viability, she argues, is the new gold standard for when an abortion can be performed on a mother and her baby.

And as for that messy PR problem of selling abortion to young women who know what it does and what it means? Well… she’s got an answer for that too:

The public is ambivalent about abortion. It wants it to be legal, but will support almost any restriction that indicates society takes the act of abortion seriously. For the choice movement to regain popular support and to maintain a legal right to abortion, it has to work with the state.

That’s right! Socialism! Let the state do through force -- by her own admission -- what discourse could not accomplish for the abortion industry.

The European system, which is currently drowning in a sea of debt, unable to replace it’s own population, and has to import hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in order to find the labor force necessary to sustain their social entitlement network.

Unfortunately for Kissling, there’s a fallacy in her logic… and she touches on it briefly:

Some of my colleagues in the abortion-rights movement will resist even this modest shift on post-first trimester abortions, fearing that any compromise reflects weakness. Give the opposition an inch and they will take a yard. I believe most in the movement share my concerns and hold more moderate positions on abortion than their rhetoric or silence implies. These shifts I am suggesting are not about compromising or finding common ground with abortion opponents. Compromise assumes that there are two parties prepared to give up something in return for settling an issue. Neither opponents nor advocates of legal abortion are willing to do that. But, for pro-choice advocates, standing our ground will mean losing ground entirely.

Therein lies the problem. Moving the defining line for when life begins from birth -- which is now held as patently absurd -- to the more scientifically ambiguous “viability” argument simply betrays a hesitation in logical consistency.

Defenders of life have consistently argued that life begins at its very earliest moments, at conception if not earlier in the instance of embryos created in the laboratory. Moreover, human life is not sacred because it has some sort of value, however infinite. Rather, human life is sacred because it has no value -- it is priceless, and created in the image and likeness of God.

Kissling knows this, and though she tries to reconcile her instincts with her career choices, the truth has a funny way of escaping all at once. Dr. Nathanson certainly came to this conclusion, and became one of the most inspiring voices in the defense of human life the movement has seen.

In the end, abortion is a sad, barbaric statement on American civilization. Either human life is respected, or it is “valued” at varying degrees. After 53 million victims, abortion doesn’t need to be merely diminished. The killing of innocents must end.

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