By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortion Hillary Clinton
As our last post of the week, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about pro-abortion presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s speech yesterday at the “Women in The World Summit” in New York City. Arch-feminist and militant pro-abortionist Amanda Marcotte, described it as “an annual feminist shindig that’s all about improving women’s fortunes around the world.” Let’s see.
Marcotte saw heavy symbolism in the location and the audience of what she sees as the first substantive speech of Clinton’s campaign. Message? “ This speech suggests she is running an aggressively feminist campaign. It’s a smart move.”
Okay. Let’s see what the part that directly relates to us has to say.
Clinton’s style was to say, “Yes, but…”-to talk about progress women have made and then talk about what else she saw as necessary:
“Yes, we’ve cut the maternal mortality rate in half but far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed [applause] As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century, and not just for women, but for everyone — and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States.”
Let me make three points.
First, as we have written countless times, Clinton’s first sentence is flatly wrong. As it happens, today we posted a statement by MCCL Executive Director Scott Fischbach for the 48th annual Commission on Population and Development, held April 13-17 at the United Nations headquarters in New York . He wrote
Some say that legalizing or expanding access to abortion is necessary to protect the lives and health of women. That is not true. Maternal health depends on the quality of medical care, not on the legal status or availability of abortion. Countries such as Ireland, Poland, Chile and Malta prohibit most or all abortions and have a very low incidence of maternal mortality. Other countries permit abortion for any reason and have a very high incidence of maternal mortality. It is a matter of fact that legalizing abortion is not necessary to reduce maternal mortality.
Indeed, for many reasons which we have talked about numerous times, legalized abortion increases maternal mortality.
Second, Matt Lewis hit the nail on the head in a brilliant analysis. He writes
If one is to assume that “reproductive health care” rights are a euphemism for abortion (a fairly safe assumption), then this is quite telling. Maybe it’s because she was speaking to a friendly audience (at the Women in The World Summit), but this honest appraisal is a reminder that politics are downstream from culture, and that uprooting long-standing religious and cultural beliefs are a prerequisite for utopian progressivism. As President Obama might say, we do tend to “cling to guns or religion.”
Hillary’s comments also remind me of something Frank Bruni wrote in a recent column, “Bigotry, the Bible, and the Lessons of Indiana.” In that piece Bruni argues that “our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.”
To which Lewis keenly adds , “[I]t is interesting that liberals are finally getting around to openly confessing something all of us sort of know — yet few will say out loud: Achieving a liberal social agenda will necessarily require first extirpating many ‘deep-seated’ Christian values and tenets.
Third, over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey takes the analysis one step deeper:
In one sense, this shows just how extreme the pro-abortion caucus actually is. As Hillary admits here — albeit unwittingly — the at-will destruction of the unborn goes against religious beliefs, long-held cultural values, and the structural “biases” that exist to recognize the value of human life. That’s what the “clump of cells” fallacy has to overcome, and as Hillary and the Left have discovered, it’s a tall order.
Watch the speech for yourself (the excerpt begins at 8:26), and put it all together, and draw your own conclusions.
My conclusion is that the danger Hillary Clinton poses has been radically underestimated.