The Times They Are a-Changin'
Don't look now, but the pro-life movement is winning.

...The polling on abortion since Roe has remained remarkably consistent: Most Americans support reasonable limits on abortion. In Gallup polling since 1973, fewer than 25 percent support the availability of abortion in all circumstances, so-called "abortion on demand." Thus, the position taken by the most extreme pro-abortion groups--the National Organization for Women, NARAL, the ACLU, and others--has the support of fewer than a quarter of the American people. A Zogby poll taken earlier this year found the majority of Americans, in some cases near 70 percent, support pro-life laws currently being considered on the state and national level--from prohibiting taxpayer funding of abortions to lifting requirements that health insurance plans cover the procedure to 24-hour waiting periods and parental notification laws.

The turning point for the pro-life movement may well have been the fight over partial-birth abortion. Most Americans had probably never heard of the procedure before former New Hampshire senator Bob Smith took to the floor of the Senate in 1995 with graphic illustrations of this gruesome procedure that entails a doctor killing a late-term, viable baby at the very moment of birth. Americans were repelled by the procedure and rightly recoiled. Few had suspected that the pitiless logic of Roe would produce this barbarous practice, one the American Medical Association says is never medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.

A large number of Americans also recoiled from the defense of a procedure that even some pro-choice advocates likened to infanticide. NOW and NARAL alienated millions of Americans with a morally obtuse defense of the indefensible. Many Americans concluded that if being for a woman's right to choose meant embracing such a hideous procedure, well, they no longer thought of themselves as pro-choice.

Other factors intervened that generated growing support for the pro-life movement. Since the day it was handed down, Roe has been at war with science and technology. Sonograms and ultrasound imaging were unknown in 1973. Today, millions of mothers get their first glimpse of their babies while they are still in the womb. The development of so-called 4-D ultrasound imaging has undercut pro-abortion efforts to dehumanize the unborn, to depict life in utero as nothing but a lump of unwanted tissue. Advances in pre-and neonatal care mean that babies born prematurely who never would have survived at the time of Roe not only survive, but also thrive and become healthy, happy children. Medical progress has made a scientific shambles of Roe's artificial trimester scheme. cont'd...