America, Apple Pie and Abortion

In 2004, Planned Parenthood began selling T-shirts emblazoned with the declaration, “I Had An Abortion.” This was part of its campaign to “demystify and destigmatize” the practice. Prominent abortion advocates felt at the time that their movement had grown too timid.

Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, argued that feminists needed to go beyond the rhetoric of “choice,” jargon he regarded as cowardly and vague. They should celebrate abortion directly and unapologetically, he said. After all, the unborn child, as an annoying interloper, deserves to die. “The unborn child is not just an innocent life,” he wrote, but a “liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family.”

Amidst such comments, the website Imnotsorry.net sprung up. The founders of the site explained that it “was created for the purpose of showing women that exercising their legal right to terminate their pregnancy is not the blood-splattered guilt trip so many make it out to be.” Space was provided on it for women to post testimonials expressing their “relief” and “joy” after an abortion.

Ron Fitzsimmons, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, also found “choice” rhetoric insipid. “We have nothing to hide,” he said to the press. “The work we’re doing is good. We are there to help women, and it’s important to talk about abortion so that it’s not a stigma.”

Abortion, he said, is more than just a choice. It is a good choice: “We can no longer respond to [pro-life arguments] with ‘it’s your right to choose.’ We need to recapture the notion that abortion is a difficult moral choice for women, but one that is, in fact, a moral choice.”

To Read the rest of this article go to The American Spectator at: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/19/abortion-is-as-american-as-app