Gloria Steinem gave a talk last week at a $100-a-head fundraiser for Planned Parenthood in Princeton, New Jersey, and make no mistake: she didn’t fail to bring the way over-the-top rhetoric:
“There is no organization in this country or the world that is more important than Planned Parenthood” — a proclamation that self-evidently illustrates how out-of-touch with reality she is.
Yet there is another remark Steinem made at the event that merits our consideration. Writer Michele Angermiller reports that Steinem told the crowd “she can’t believe that people in 2011 are still debating such issues as contraception, abortion and a woman’s right to choose.”
Think about that for a minute.
Since long before I came to work for the Pro-Life Action League, our national director, Joe Scheidler, has been saying more or less the same thing in countless talks he’s given across the country:
In 1973, seven justices of the Supreme Court—or, as Joe is fond of ironically referring to them, the “Supreme Beings”—decreed that abortion-on-demand was the law of the land, and there was nothing we ordinary citizens could do about it but roll over and accept it.
Except, of course, we didn’t. And we won’t—ever—accept that it’s perfectly legal to kill unborn babies.
That’s why we we’ve never stopped trying to save babies and their mothers from abortion.
It’s precisely because pro-lifers have refused to accept that there is nothing we can do to change the status quo of legal abortion that causes someone like Gloria Steinem to wonder out loud, 38 years after Roe v. Wade, why people are still debating about a “woman’s right to choose.”
This is a struggle we must never give up.
