Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on abortion-rights activists:
Pro-abortion activists are in a state of hysteria. The reasons why are not hard to understand.
In communities and states across the country there has been an explosion in pro-life legislation. In fact, more than 500 legal restrictions have been introduced in state legislatures over the past four months. Moreover, there are now 29 “sanctuary cities” for the unborn, locales that prohibit abortion procurement and services. On top of this, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Mississippi case that could overturn Roe v. Wade. No wonder the alarms are going off in pro-abortion quarters.
As usual, pro-abortion activists are speaking from the same playbook. Alexis McGill Johnson, the president of Planned Parenthood, calls current conditions “dire.” Speaking like the hard-core leftist that she is, she sees “intersectionality” at work, or a confluence of forces that work to undermine her agenda. That is why she blames “misogyny,” “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” for what ails her mission.
NARAL Pro-Choice America also cites the harm that legal protections for the unborn bequeath. Such laws “disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and people of color; low-income; and rural communities, and are part of a coordinated effort by the Right to maintain white patriarchal control at all costs.”
As one who has been part of the pro-life community for decades, I believe I speak for most of us when I say that such characterizations are total nonsense. No one in our camp speaks the way these pro-abortion fanatics think we speak. What motivates us is quite simple: offering protections for the life of innocent unborn babies. We are not interested in punishing anyone or in servicing some racial or political cause.
Others blame the Catholic Church. Jamie Manson, the lesbian activist who runs the anti-Catholic pro-abortion letterhead called Catholics for Choice, tells us in a New York Times guest essay that “the pervasive theology [of the Catholic Church] shapes policies that cause women untold suffering.” She means by that the Church’s opposition to abortion. She does not explain why more Catholic women attend Mass than men do, and why Catholic women are in the forefront of the pro-life community.
Many pro-abortion activists are not convinced that President Biden has done enough to serve their agenda. This is strange given that he is the most rabid pro-abortion president in the history of our nation. He even wants to force taxpayers to pay for abortions. He also supports legislation that could make Catholic hospitals perform them. What more do they want?
They want him to “talk the talk.” McGill Johnson says, “He has work to do in talking through things, actually saying the word ‘abortion.'” Manson blames the bishops for intimidating him from being more blunt. “It’s no accident that Mr. Biden still has not uttered the word ‘abortion’ since his election and his administration often uses euphemisms like ‘women’s health care,’ ‘choice,’ ‘bodily autonomy’ and ‘reproductive rights.'”
Renee Bracey Sherman, who runs an abortion storytelling group, We Testify, has had it with White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “I am glad to see that [Psaki] took the time to share that President Biden does indeed believe that we should have the right to abortion, but it’s getting a little comical that she is utterly unable to say the word or what the administration plans to do about expanding access.”
These are not rational voices. Leaving aside the irrationality of rejecting the scientific evidence that life begins at conception, their condemnation of Biden and his administration for not “talking their talk”—even though they are winning on policy—shows how they have succumbed to delirium.
The pro-life community should be emboldened by this hysteria. It demonstrates that even though our “devout Catholic” president is not on our side, he cannot stop us from moving forward.
