Newsweek author asks wrong question

Sarah Kliff asks, How can the next generation defend abortion rights when they don't think abortion rights need defending?

Aside from the obvious question -- How can there even be a "next generation" when you're aborting them? -- there's the question Kliff ought to ask: Why would the youth generation defend abortion rights when they recognize abortion as a wrong?

Just a few points to raise about the article itself:

The Democratic Party has, since 1980, supported a woman's right to an abortion.

1. Who is this woman?

2. At least Kliff is admitting that it's about a right to abortion, not some amorphous "choice".

Anti-abortion Democrats, most notably the now retiring Rep. Bart Stupak, pressed for stringent abortion restrictions.

This shows a lot about Kliff's attitude -- that she thinks refusing to take people's money by force of law and use it to pay for other people's abortions is somehow a "stringent abortion restriction".

And what worries [NARAL president Nancy] Keenan is that she just doesn't see a passion among the post-Roe generation—at least, not among those on her side.

Perhaps because her generation aborted so many of the post-Roe generation.

This past January, when Keenan's train pulled into Washington's Union Station, a few blocks from the Capitol, she was greeted by a swarm of anti-abortion-rights activists. It was the 37th annual March for Life, organized every year on Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe. "I just thought, my gosh, they are so young," Keenan recalled. "There are so many of them, and they are so young."

I remember when I attended a Feminists for Life board meeting in DC. The representative of the FFL college outreach was crying, saying to us, the older women, "This is my generation that's been attacked. It's not the same for you." And she's right.

The younger generation of prolife activists sees a nation in which 1/3 of their peers were killed before birth. That's 1/3 of their siblings, prospective classmates, friends, romantic interests, co-workers. And they feel this absence acutely.

Not that there aren't abortion supporters among the young. But for all the keening about "access" and "restrictions" among the abortion shills, young abortion supporters look around their communities and hardly see a lack of "access":

As one young mother in a focus group told NARAL, it seemed to her that abortion was easily accessible. How did she know? The parking lot at her local clinic, she told them, was always full.

And even among young supporters of legal abortion, there's not the enthusiasm for abortion that the oldsters embrace:

In the NARAL focus groups, young voters flat-out disapproved of a woman's abortion, called her actions immoral, yet maintained that the government had absolutely no right to intervene.

These aren't young women likely to encourage their friends to abort, not likely to do their part to see to it that the parking lots stay full (along with the NARAL coffers that abortion money flows into through the hands of clinic owners).

Millennials also came of age as ultrasounds provided increasingly clear pictures of fetal development.

They're no longer so ignorant and likely to get suckered into the "blob of tissue" lie as previous generations.

Yet, despite this trend, Americans are still largely on NARAL's side

Only if you define "NARAL's side" as "not banning all abortions". If you look at things NARAL supports, such as lack of informed consent, lack of parental involvement, abortions through all nine months of pregnancy, etc., you find minority support, even among people who self-identify as "prochoice". And Kliff obliquely admits this:

Since 1975 yearly Gallup polls have found that public support for legal abortion in at least some circumstances hovers between 75 and 85 percent.

"At least some circumstances" -- meaning that you have to count people who only want abortion legal in a "life of the mother" scenario to be able to come up with 75-85% support. What percent, pray tell, support abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy, with no waiting periods, no informed consent, no parental involvement for underage girls, and no safety or consumer protection measures in place? I dare say it's gonna be way less than 75%.

[To generate youth support], within the abortion-rights community there's a growing consensus on a promising path forward: start an open discussion about the moral, ethical, and emotional complexity of abortion that would be more likely to resonate with young Americans.

Play the "It's so sad; just look away" card. But with prolifers saying, "It's so sad -- how can you just look away?" this might backfire and lead young people to support the prolife centers that are helping women avoid abortions, rather than channeling them, weeping, into abortion mills.

And perhaps, having seen mothers, aunts, and sisters weeping in the night has left this generation of women unwilling to pass the anguish on to their own daughters.