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| A baby reaches out of the womb during pre-natal surgery. Credit: ThornWalker.com |
Weekly Standard commentator Jay Cost points out in a Sept. 17 column that among the widely publicized changes to party policy reflected in its 2012 platform, the Democrats made a third significant change: They no longer refer to abortion as a necessary evil, which should be "rare":
"Today’s Democrats didn’t just make abortion rights a key theme of their convention," wrote Cost. "They also changed the way they talk about abortion. They used to present it as a tragedy, but something they were prepared to abide for various reasons. They argued that abortion represented a failure of the social system—somewhere along the line the women seeking one had been let down, by inadequate education, or by their families, or by men, or by a health care system that denied them access to contraception. The choice to abort should be protected, but it should also be regretted.
"That’s why, for a dozen years, Democrats—beginning with Bill Clinton—claimed that they wanted abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare.” In Charlotte, the word 'rare' was dropped from the party’s platform and never appeared in any of the speeches.
"The practical cause for this evolution is Obamacare, which paved the way for federal funding of abortion. The passage of the unpopular bill required the Democrats’ handful of remaining antiabortion congressmen to cave and follow the party. Many of them—Kathy Dahlkemper, Lincoln Davis, Jim Oberstar, Steve Driehaus, Travis Childers, and Bobby Bright, among others—were defeated as a result of their Obamacare votes. With pro-life Democrats now nearly extinct as a caucus, the abortion-rights wing of the party was free to talk about abortion the way they really think about it."
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