Life Links 1/24/13

The Detroit News columnist Laura Berman has a rudderless and rather pointless column discussing Planned Parenthood's attempt to re-frame the abortion issue and dump the "pro-choice" label.  It's entitled "Rhetoric impedes abortion debate" which is odd coming from someone whose columns have been permeated with pro-choice rhetoric for years.  Maybe it's just prolife rhetoric which impedes pro-choicers from having their way? 

I think a lot of the talking heads who are basically Planned Parenthood tools are having a difficult time taking Planned Parenthood's newest talking points and trying to make them sound cohesive with their beliefs and arguments. 


Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk abortion, the prolife movement and single mother families in Salon and argue that the success of the prolife movement is the cause of the rise of out-of--wedlock births.  Ross Douthat responds:

But Cahn and Carbone's suggestion notwithstanding, for whites as well as minorities the steepest increase in the out-of-wedlock birth rate actually occurred in the years immediately following Roe itself. (If you look at figure 13 in this document, you'll see that the white out-of-wedlock birth rate nearly quadrupled between 1970 and 1990; it has only risen by about fifty percent in the two decades since.) Meanwhile, divorce rates and teen pregnancy rates both rose with the abortion rate and then fell with it from the early 1990s onward — which, again, is not exactly the pattern you'd expect if abortion-on-demand was a major boon to the two-parent household, and pro-life sentiment a significant driver of family breakdown. 

Some pro-choice tolerance at DePaul:

At about 5:00PM Tuesday evening the DePaul YAF chairman, Kristopher Del Campo, along with other executive board members, went to remove the flag display. But what they found was startling; the flags had been removed and stuffed into trash bins inside and outside the entrance to the DePaul library.