For two years, Republicans have been haunted by Todd Akin syndrome, in which a spectacular gaffe in an abortion-themed context becomes a costly embarrassment to a candidate’s party. And they were right. But the good news for them is that the bug is contagious. Democrats have lately been showing its symptoms, proving no one is immune.
The first sign their ear had begun getting tinny came early this year when Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards wandered onto the “House of Cards” set to lend moral support to fictitious Claire Underwood, sinister spouse of the conniving vice president. Mrs. Underwood revealed to an aide that she had three abortions, two as a teen and one as a candidate’s wife who called the thing off in the second trimester when it interfered with her husband’s campaign.
The idea was that the glamorous Claire would make this acceptable. But the point is that the Underwoods are supposed to be killers. They performed an exceedingly late-term abortion on a Congressman whom Frank gassed to death in his auto, and then a female reporter whom he pushed under a train. So murderers are on board with late-term abortion? What a great selling point. Call this strike one.
Strike two is working itself out in the midterm elections, when the Democrats put all of their eggs in the birth-control basket, insisting that nuns subsidize contraception and that any restrictions at all on abortion mean war. They targeted Senate candidates Joni Ernst in Iowa and Cory Gardner in Colorado, with the happy result that both are now leading, quickly closing the gender gap among women. Last Friday, the liberal Denver Post rocked the political world by endorsing Gardner over the man called “Mark Uterus” because of his single-minded obsession. “[Sen. Mark] Udall is trying to frighten voters rather than inspire them,” said the paper, correctly. “His obnoxious one-issue campaign is an insult to those he seeks to convince.”
The same day, Wendy Davis — the pink-sneakered hope of the Left who soared to notoriety when she stood in them for twelve hours in the state house in Texas to deliver a plea for late-term abortion — tied the anchor around her neck even tighter when she issued an ad featuring the wheelchair of her opponent, Greg Abbott. She accused Abbott of accepting a $10.7 million settlement from the owners of the tree that had crippled him, saying he had cashed in on his woes.
This in the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, another guy in a wheelchair who ran for state office and became one of two people who saved the free world. The point is that if it’s sense, sensibility or even minimal decency you’re after, it’s not to be found in pro-choice extremists, who wouldn’t know what these were if they fell over them, which they so frequently do.
The other point is that it’s not being pro-life or pro-choice that dooms people, but the way that they do it —which is to say, either side can lose by being extreme, stupid or crass. People forget this is an uneasy issue, about which many are deeply ambivalent, keenly aware of life’s difficult corners but giving life at all stages more value than many pro-choicers admit.
That is why a sizeable portion of the public acquiesces to the legality of abortions it does not approve of, but changes its mind once a fetus resembles a baby, somewhere between months four or five. Urged on by the press, the Left often mistakes its fringe for the mainstream. But Akins, as we found out Friday, tend to appear on all sides.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
