As reported here yesterday, Planned Parenthood is now declaring that they’re through talking about “choice” — a term they’ve discovered doesn’t resonate with Americans much anymore.
They’re also claiming that support for legal abortion is at an all-time high, based on both last November’s election results and some opinion polling they’ve been doing. As MSNBC’s headline styles it, “More and more pro-life Americans support abortion rights.”
In a nutshell, Planned Parenthood is trying to co-opt the term “pro-life.”
I can see why they’d want to. It’s got to be worrying them that more and more people are calling themselves pro-life.
So now they’re trying to claim that those majorities aren’t really pro-life. Their main piece of “evidence” for this claim is that some 64% of Americans say they don’t want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
But if that statistic is true, what does it really mean? My guess is that by “I support Roe v. Wade” most people really mean, “I don’t support a total legal ban on abortion.”
But then, why are more people identifying as pro-life? Planned Parenthood pretends that it’s because “pro-life” sounds so appealing — who would call themselves “anti-life”?
That may explain why some people prefer to be called “pro-life” even if their actual views square better with the “pro-choice” label. But it doesn’t explain the trend — why the number of people donning the “pro-life” label has been going up.
So I’ll offer a different explanation: Americans are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with abortion. They may not be ready to translate that discomfort into supporting a strict legal ban on abortion, but they don’t like it. They can see that abortion takes a human life. They can see that it’s wrong, and they acknowledge that by saying they are pro-life.
But it’s not just those who self-identify as pro-life who don’t like abortion. Though 41% are still telling Gallup they’re pro-choice (a number that’s been trending downward), only 29% of voters told exit pollsters they think abortion should be legal in every case.
That means that when people say they’re “pro-choice,” many of then don’t mean what Planned Parenthood means (or, apparently, used to mean, now that they’re abandoning that exhausted piece of propaganda).
It’s telling that Planned Parenthood is putting the focus on Roe v. Wade. Few Americans really understand what Roe v. Wade actually says or how dubious the court’s legal reasoning really was.
Even fewer have even heard of Roe‘s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, which legalized abortion up to the last moment of pregnancy—an idea abhorrent to most people.
In reality, most Americans don’t support the unlimited abortion-on-demand regime that Roe and Doe put in place—and that Planned Parenthood defends with everything they’ve got.
No wonder Planned Parenthood wants to obfuscate their position and claim the allegiance of all those people who say they’re pro-life, but still believe abortion should be legal in some cases.
No wonder Planned Parenthood wants to abandon the term “pro-choice” when so many of those who claim it don’t believe abortion should be a legal choice in every single case, like Planned Parenthood does.
And no wonder they’d make this big announcement the very same week that they issued their latest annual report—anything to distract the mainstream media and the public from seeing that they’re reporting their biggest abortion numbers yet.
Because at the end of the day, Planned Parenthood is really Abortion, Incorporated, pursuing an abortion agenda radically out of step from most people’s views on the issue. It’s our job to ensure that more and more Americans know it.
