Pro-choice and pro-life demonstrators gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, June 24.
Photo:
mandel ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
I neither cried nor jumped for joy when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion has never been among my top-priority issues when voting, and I don’t spend much time thinking about it. That may be hard to believe, but it’s true for a lot of people.
Now that the justices have said it isn’t their job but ours to decide how to regulate abortion, both pro-choice and pro-life activists are going to have to do better if they want the sympathy and votes of Americans like me. We can be persuaded with thoughtful, considered debate. We haven’t gotten much of it.
I bumped into a pro-choice activist at Union Station in Washington shortly after the leak of the draft decision in May. She held a big sign that read I LOVE MY ABORTION. I winced reflexively, as I do whenever celebrities proudly boast of their “empowering” terminations. The inability to draw a line between the defense of a right to abortion and the celebration of its practice poisons the pro-choice message.
A word of advice to those who support abortion rights: Don’t hire angry-looking women with fake blood on their pants to parade around screaming at the cameras. And don’t let politicians continue to spin what just happened into a national abortion ban, or a war on women, which it isn’t. These tactics repel people, rather than draw them in. We will never hear a word you say.
Then there are pro-life activists like
Lila Rose
of Live Action, who said in an interview Friday: “The science is conclusive. Human life doesn’t begin at birth. It begins before birth, at the moment of fertilization.”
A word of advice to those who are pro-life and want me to be as well: Don’t confuse moral and ethical arguments with scientific ones. We know the difference. You are in possession of both to some degree, and I would like to…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at RSSOpinion…