The Devil Wears Pink Sneakers

Wendy Davis' Texas Senate filibuster was a tactical blunder for the pro-abortion lobby. She was obstructing what seemed like reasonable reforms to most of us; prohibiting most abortions after 20 weeks instead of 24, and enacting requirements for sanitary conditions, provisions for medical care when something goes wrong, and protection for viable babies born alive. The raucous demonstrations in the capitol that accompanied the filibuster exposed abortionists as the extremists many of them are.

Do these people really want to keep the discussion going? Public acceptance of legal abortion has always depended on a certain averting of the eyes. The Kermit Gosnell trial forced us, or many of us, to look at the gruesome reality of blood, gore, and murder that is late term abortion. The Davis filibuster put it in the headlines with a main stream media that largely ignored Gosnell.

Most of us are at least squeamish about abortion and oppose late term abortion most of the time. To present it as a women's health issue strikes us as a willful distraction. It rarely has to do with the health of the mother and can present health risks of its own. For many, victims of rape and incest should represent an exception. The health of the mother should too, if the risk is serious and genuine, and those exemptions were included in the proposed legislation. But to suggest a baby is not a baby until the mother takes it home from the hospital is an unspeakable denial of the most fundamental human right.

Kermit Gosnell killed babies that survived abortion by snipping their spinal cords with surgical scissors. Now comes Houston abortion clinic operator Douglas Karpen who is accused of killing them by twisting their necks, much like a hunter would put a wounded dove out of its misery. I don't know if Karpen really does that but it is a serious charge. I am disappointed it took a public exposé to get authorities to look into it. I will be surprised if that investigation doesn't come up again now that we are guaranteed another round of debate in the legislature. It is becoming harder for the media to ignore.

We are reviving a debate that is as old as history. Infanticide was one of the many sins of the ancient Israelites. But what has been missing since Roe v Wade is a reasoned discussion among people who aren't quite sure of the answer. It has been drowned out in a shouting match between those who would always allow abortion at the sole discretion of the mother, and those who would always ban it. What we are discovering is there is a middle ground after all. It is occupied by more Americans than we thought, and we are talking about it.

It would be wrong to simply say it is the result of the Gosnell trial, or of the Davis filibuster. We are also reviving another ancient idea. Early church fathers thought a fetus became a person at quickening. Advances in sonograms and other technology are making more people think they may have been on to something. A fetus looks like a baby very early on. It begins to act like a baby and even have the feelings and reflexes of a baby earlier than we realized. More people are pro-life than in years.

Count me among those in the pro-life community who know we aren't going to get everything we want any time soon and are looking for ways to compromise. Right now we see an opening. Wendy Davis and her allies see it too and are pulling out all the stops. But I don't think this conversation is what they had in mind