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Dems: No Apologies For Abortion

Margaret Carlson notices something important about the Democrats: Why has the party removed the sentence “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” from its platform? It was in the 2004 document but not in 2008’s or this year’s. Can’t Democrats just throw a crumb to the many millions who are pro-choice but not pro-abortion? Last week, […]

Margaret Carlson notices something important about the Democrats:

Why has the party removed the sentence “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” from its platform? It was in the 2004 document but not in 2008’s or this year’s. Can’t Democrats just throw a crumb to the many millions who are pro-choice but not pro-abortion?

Last week, Democrats feasted on the extreme positions of Representative Todd Akin of Missouri (and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, for that matter) during the Republican National Convention. Yet Democrats have gone too far in the other direction, threatening their hold on the great American middle. Speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich pushed the issue, claiming, “The president of the United States voted three times to protect the right of doctors to kill babies who came out of an abortion still alive” and arguing that the Democratic platform supports “partial-birth abortion.”

More:

Votes by former Illinois state legislator Barack Obama — the votes Gingrich cited on “Meet the Press” — sound shocking when presented without constitutional or practical context. Yet Obama and many other Democrats have opposed a ban on partial- birth abortion on the slim reed that its only exception is to protect the life and health of the mother. They say the procedure is exceedingly rare. But the health of the mother exception is vast, encompassing age, emotional, familial and state of mind factors broad enough to include virtually any woman in any circumstances.

It’s a terrible thing to force a 12-year-old who lives in chaos and hopelessness, with a boyfriend who has disappeared or an abusive uncle who hasn’t, to have a baby. But it’s worse to let her abort it after she waits so long for help that the only difference between the baby being born alive or dead is a gruesome procedure that Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said approximated “infanticide.”

I will say this for the Democrats, who have used this convention to fully endorse same-sex marriage, and now, apparently, abortion on demand: they are at least no longer pretending to be more moderate than they really are. That’s progress, I guess.

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