Today is the annual March for Life, held every year on January 22 to protest abortion and press for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
As such, Religious Right groups are doing what they do every year, with the Family Research Council hosting its Blogs for Life Conference and March for Life organizers and activists complaining that the media isn’t paying attention to them and nobody takes them seriously:
Still, Nellie Gray — who founded the March for Life 36 years ago — pines for some meaningful attention from the press. Her marchers hit the streets near the Capitol on Thursday, virtually retracing the steps of an estimated 1.8 million inaugural revelers whose every move was chronicled by a crush of media just two days earlier.
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“Anyone climbing on a bus from somewhere else, thinking they’re going to wave into a network news camera, is going to be very disappointed. In the last 20 years, despite large annual crowds, the liberal manufacturers of TV have simply never found the March for Life to be the slightest bit newsworthy,” said Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, drawing a comparison to a liberal antiwar activist.
“Everyone knows that a single Cindy Sheehan in the summer seems to be worth more than 20,000 pro-lifers in January.”
For his part, Gary Bauer has seemingly decided to dedicate this day to getting his name in print – first with an op-ed with Star Parker in The Weekly Standard:
A century and a half ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that African Americans have no rights under the Constitution. Barack Obama’s election would seem to put the final nail in the coffin of that evil philosophy. With its Roe decision, however, the court again wrongly declared that some Americans are entitled to no constitutional rights and can be destroyed at the discretion of others. Sadly, that evil philosophy will be given new hope under President Obama.
The battle for equal rights has reached a major milestone. But Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of full equality will remain just a dream as long as unborn children are denied the right to life, the most fundamental right of all.
And secondly with a solo op-ed in the Politico debunking the “myths” of Roe:
Another misconception concerns what would happen if Roe were overturned. The day after Roe’s reversal, abortion policy would revert back to the states. Some states would severely restrict abortion, while a bigger group of more populous states would likely pass laws guaranteeing the same access to abortion they have now. So, far from ending the abortion battle, Roe’s reversal would mark the beginning of a battle to which the past 35 years have been a prelude.
A post-Roe America would look like the America of today in terms of the sheer volume of abortions. The major difference would be an anti-abortion movement toiling to tackle 50 separate abortion policies simultaneously. Another important difference is that we would no longer teach young Americans the lie that — among their cherished constitutional rights of free speech, religion and assembly — there is also a right to take the life of an unborn baby.
A final misconception about Roe is one too often held by its opponents: that Roe’s reversal is the ultimate anti-abortion goal and that support for constitutional protections for the unborn betrays the federalist principles of conservatism. But by asserting states’ rights, Roe’s anti-abortion opposition effectively (if unwittingly) accepts Roe’s reasoning that prenatal life is not a due process right within the constitutional framework and, therefore, that the unborn child is not a constitutional “person.”
Moreover, in our system of government, certain issues are left to the states while others are deemed so essential to our understanding of democracy that they must be taken up nationally. We fought a civil war over the conviction that some issues are too fundamental to be decided state by state. Just as slavery was an assault on human dignity, the slaughter of millions of unborn children is an assault on a natural human right that exists prior to, and regardless of, the whims of a majority.
So you see there really is nothing to worry about – anti-choice activists merely want to overturn Roe so that the issue can be decided by the states … and then they can eliminate the right to reproductive choice in all fifty of them by passing a constitutional amendment making it illegal.
