Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Forty-five years after the passage of Roe v. Wade opened the door to a holocaust that took the lives of more than 60 million Americans, the abortion industry and its disingenuous messaging is in enough of a decline that an annual march full of angry women pushing progressive causes will not be enough to save it.
Breitbart is reporting on Saturday’s marches which brought thousands of pro-abortion women into the streets in cities around the world to demand “reproductive rights,” equal pay, and an end to sexual harassment.
While some of these causes are valiant, the March’s consistent exclusion of pro-life women reveals that its ideology is not about women’s rights at all. It’s about women’s “reproductive rights” which they define as being in favor of abortion on demand. Even though the radical organizers of the March, such as Planned Parenthood, espouse this radical view of abortion, polls have consistently shown that the majority of American women, including those who identify as “pro-choice,” favor substantial restrictions on the procedure. They might march in lock-step but, apparently, their views are not exactly squared.
But this is just the tip of the iceburg that is slowly carving a hole into the steel hull of the abortion industry in the U.S.
As Emma Green reports in The Atlantic, science has done the most damage to the abortion cause.
“When the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, the case that led the way to legal abortion, it pegged most fetuses’ chance of viable life outside the womb at 28 weeks; after that point, it ruled, states could reasonably restrict women’s access to the procedure. Now, with new medical techniques, doctors are debating whether that threshold should be closer to 22 weeks,” Green writes.
Parents are seeing their unborn child via high-tech ultrasound imagery that can capture every adorable move of their baby and as they share these images with family and friends, it slowly begins to erode the false notion that Planned Parenthood built its business on – that fetuses are just a bunch of cells in their early stages and, therefore, not human life.
As Green argues, “These advances fundamentally shift the moral intuition around abortion. New technology makes it easier to apprehend the humanity of a growing child and imagine a fetus as a creature with moral status. Over the last several decades, pro-life leaders have increasingly recognized this and rallied the power of scientific evidence to promote their cause. They have built new institutions to produce, track, and distribute scientifically crafted information on abortion. They hungrily follow new research in embryology. They celebrate progress in neonatology as a means to save young lives.”
While it’s not always a good thing to rely on science rather than sound moral arguments against abortion, new technology is just one reason why the abortion industry is sagging.
Due to its own fault, involvement in the trafficking of fetal body parts has cast one of the darkest shadows yet over the industry. When videos were released in 2015 showing abortion industry executives bartering over fetal body parts, 68 percent of Americans called for an investigation. The government responded and Planned Parenthood is now under formal investigation.
The majority of Americans are also against tax-payer funding for abortion, which poses the most serious threat yet to Planned Parenthood’s hefty bottom line.
The industry’s profits are also eroding due to a serious decline in the number of abortuaries that are currently operating in the U.S. due to the passage of state laws demanding improved clinic safety, lack of doctors willing to provide abortions, and other factors.
For example, in 2017, more abortion clinics closed than were opened. As Breitbart reports, 49 abortion facilities closed in 2017 – 35 surgical and 14 medication-only clinics – but only eight new facilities were opened along with 11 new medication-only clinics.
American Life League reports that Planned Parenthood alone has lost 341 facilities in the last 22 years.
But you’d never know this to watch the glowing coverage of the Women’s March by a media that kept its cameras pinned on the enraged rhetoric of speakers such as Hollywood stars like Whoopi Goldberg and Natalie Portman. Nor could they get enough of the “pink hats” and their signs full of unmentionable expletives.
Meanwhile, one day earlier, and with barely a peep from the press, hundreds of thousands of peaceful but powerful voices marched on Washington just as they have done for the last 45 years but with an ever-growing sense that their consistency and perseverance is finally paying off.
As one pro-life marcher, Caroline Routson, confidently told Breitbart, “angry and militant” activists aren’t solving problems.
“There’s so much sadness in the world. To be angry and militant and to murder a child does not solve the problem,” Routson said.
And it never will. Which is why, ever so slowly, we are winning this war for life.
May God grant us the courage to persist until that glorious day when the scourge of abortion is finally erased from the face of the earth.
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