Howard Dean's Abortion Distortions
A friend of mine, Randall K. O'Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education at National Right to Life (NRLC). An article he wrote posted today in Today's News and Views, NRLC's daily commentary. It is a great rebuttal to recent comments Howard Dean made in a Weekly Standard interview.
Dr. O'Bannon wrote:
Someone once remarked that "you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts." In a discussion with the Weekly Standard deputy online editor John McCormack, pro-abortion Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean showed that, when it came to abortion, he believes and promotes a lot of ideas that just aren't so (Weekly Standard, 6/12/08). Let's look briefly at the background.
The 2004 Democratic Party Platform stated what many Democratic candidates have said before and since: that they "proudly stand for a woman's right to choose" and believe that "Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare."
Dean, once the governor of Vermont, offered a related platitude which also combines a fervent embrace of abortion and a timid/meaningless assurance that the party is not the party of abortion on demand. Dean told McCormack that the Democratic party believes that "individuals have a right to make up their own minds in personal matters...but this party also believes that we ought to significantly reduce the number of abortions in this country." Let's deconstruct these two sound bites.
Abortion is legal, but hardly safe. Women continue to die and be injured each year as a result of both surgical and chemical abortion procedures. Abortion has become more rare--the best efforts of Dean and the National Democratic Party to the contrary notwithstanding-- due to the hard work of pro-life Americans and their pro-life leaders.
But it wasn't just the usual contradictory pro-abortion bromides that made Dean's comments so interesting. He dealt with the substantive impact of public policy on abortion and got it all wrong. . .
See the complete article at the Today's News and Views page on the NRLC website.
