Why is American discourse so gridlocked on abortion? Simple: because abortion’s most powerful advocates refuse to discuss any aspect of the issue honestly or rationally. Case in point: the House of Representatives just passed the Protect Life Act, which would prevent ObamaCare funds from financing abortion and protect the conscience rights of healthcare workers who don’t want to participate in the bloody practice.
Sounds reasonable, right? Not to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who savaged the bill’s supporters on Thursday:
Under this bill, when the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene if this bill is passed. It’s just appalling.
Wow. You’ve got to marvel at the audacity of a hardcore pro-abort lecturing others about their policies’ death tolls.
Hyperbole aside, Life Site News reports that Pelosi’s characterization of the law is a bald-faced lie:
The measure would amend President Obama’s Affordable Care Act to reflect the Hyde amendment by prohibiting taxpayer dollars from funding any health plan that includes coverage of elective abortions. The measure retains Hyde’s exception for abortions performed due to the child’s conception in rape or incest or to save the mother’s life. [Emphasis added.]
Nancy Pelosi
The Protect Life Act doesn’t prohibit a single abortion. It doesn’t punish anyone who seeks or performs an abortion. It merely ensures that people who don’t want to personally participate in or contribute to it won’t be forced to do so. It couldn’t possibly be any more modest, and no pro-choicer who sincerely respected differing beliefs on the subject would have any trouble agreeing to it.
But Nancy Pelosi doesn’t respect differing beliefs. She doesn’t particularly care about being a good steward of Americans’ tax dollars, about the consciences of the people she serves, or even about her own church’s teachings on abortion. To her, anything less than unconditional support for abortion is intolerable, and must be terminated with extreme prejudice.
Why? Because any real discussion about abortion would inevitably reveal that supporting “choice” is not a moderate position, but a monstrously extreme one. It can’t withstand scrutiny on either moral or scientific grounds, so pro-aborts like Pelosi are left with only one weapon: emotional appeals, which they hope will spook those who aren’t paying attention into thinking the real horrors are happening on the other side, and intimidate those who know better with the fear of being blamed for women’s deaths.
Such attacks may seem full of sound and fury, but they signify nothing without the truth backing them up. Demagogues like Nancy Pelosi can only stop someone who lets himself be paralyzed by fear, not someone with the confidence to articulate his real position and call lies what they really are.
