Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Life Links 1/22/13

National Review's editors discuss Roe at 40.
Pro-lifers are not winning: The suggestion is obscene. Nearly 56 million human beings have been killed in the womb since Roe, a toll that rises another million each year. The pro-life movement's achievement is a witness, not a victory. We have maintained resistance to an injustice rather than vanquished it.

But neither have we suffered a final defeat, nor will we so long as Americans remain who are willing to stand for the country's true founding principle: that all men are created equal by their Creator; that all of them have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whatever their creed or station, their race or their place, their might or their weakness.

NBC/WSJ has a new poll out on abortion and Roe v. Wade.  The poll results again show that large swaths of the population (41%) in this poll don't know anything about Roe v. Wade and when the pollsters give an inaccurate description ("first three month" baloney) of Roe's results, the majority are opposed to overturning it.  31% claimed they thought abortion should always be legal which seems high.  Imagine this follow-up: "So you think it should be legal to have an abortion in the 8th month of pregnancy?" 

The poll's options seem to favor the pro-choice side as the pro-choice options are always legal or legal most of the time while the prolife options are illegal without exceptions and illegal with rape/incest/mother's life exceptions.  There is a rather large gap and many plausible positions between legal "most of the time" and illegal except for exceptions. 


At First Things, John Murdock discusses the March for Life and wonders why more evangelicals don't participate.
My experience is that rank and file evangelical Protestants like myself generally just give lip service and votes to the life issue and are a small minority at the March for Life. I don't know exactly why that is the case. Certainly, there are thousands of evangelicals doing important grass roots pro-life work like running crisis pregnancy centers, and there are many notable examples of passionate peaceful protest efforts flowing from non-Catholic traditions.

Russell Moore on "Is the Pro-Life Cause Winning?":
Yes, it's a win just that the concept of "pro-life" is still alive. The abortion rights movement probably assumed that forty years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion that the issue would be as settled as school integration or women's suffrage. It's still a controversy, and the pro-life side hasn't been sidelined by history.

And it's true that there have been some gains in the numbers of doctors who, for conscience reasons, are unwilling to go along with the lie that abortion is "health-care."

That said, we must remember that the large numbers of self-identified pro-life people might itself in some instances be an indicator of just how embedded the abortion rights culture is in American life.

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