Just as they’ve done for 37 years, tens of thousands of demonstrators will converge on Washington on Friday to protest the controversial 1973 Supreme Court decision that transformed abortion from a crime into a constitutional right. But there’s a new sense of urgency surrounding this year’s annual March for Life.
As their decades-long effort to defeat the “culture of death” was finally paying off — a Gallup poll in May found that for the first time, 51 percent of Americans defined themselves as “pro-life” — marchers are facing what could be their Waterloo.
Instead of changing the culture of death, they’re at increased risk of being sucked into it.
For years, the Hyde Amendment shielded them from paying for a grisly procedure they consider the moral equivalent of murder. But the Senate’s recently passed health care bill, which enshrines abortion as a mandated insurance benefit, would change that.
The bill lacks a conscious clause allowing health care providers to opt out on moral or religious grounds. If it passes, pro-life doctors and nurses will be forced to perform abortions or risk losing their medical licenses.
How hypocritical proponents of “the right to choose” justify taking away that same right from those who disagree with them is hard to fathom, but they’ve shown an unseemly willingness to trample other people’s choices on the way to cashing government checks.
The Obamacare juggernaut seems to be unstoppable — except for two unexpected twists.
The first is Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts for the seat of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D. Republican Scott Brown is poised to pull off one of the biggest political upsets ever and eliminate the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. For pro-lifers, however, the race is much more nuanced that that.
“Scott Brown is pro-choice, but he opposes partial-birth abortion and supports conscience clauses,” pro-life activist Pat Archbold said in summing up their dilemma in the National Catholic Register. “His opponent, Democrat and Catholic Martha Coakley, is so virulently anti-life that she opposes conscience clauses and has even gone so far as to suggest that practicing Catholics should not work in emergency rooms.
“The Catholic in the race has subsequently been accused of anti-Catholicism. You can’t make this stuff up. … I will pray for the pro-choice Republican to win and the Catholic to lose. I sure hope God doesn’t get confused, because I sure am.”
Pro-lifers’ other glimmer of hope is the line in the sand drawn by Reps. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and Joe Pitts, R-Pa., both pro-life Catholics who forced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to include their Hyde-like amendment in the House bill. The 64 pro-life House Democrats who voted for the amendment are now under incredible pressure to toe the party line.
Even liberal Firedoglake blogger David Dayen admits that if they don’t cave in, they pose a real problem for Democrats who insist on the Senate language, which the National Right to Life Committee calls the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade: “… A bill with no negotiating room on abortion won’t fly, because those dozen or so Stupak holdouts won’t have much of a problem tanking it,” Dayen concludes.
On the eve of what should be their most triumphant march ever, with a majority of Americans finally on their side, pro-lifers ironically find themselves with their backs to the wall and their hopes hanging on two slender threads: that a pro-choice Republican wins in Massachusetts, and that at the moment of reckoning, House members won’t desert the cause.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
