But Bill Clinton and the Party’s platform were at least willing to pay lip service to pro-life Americans, especially those within the Democratic Party.
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“As a feminist and a mother, I find it troubling that the Democrats have such extreme views in support of abortion”, said Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, an assistant professor at Marquette University.
“It’s definitely frustrating”, said Christina Healy, a 24-year-old medical student from Cleveland. We couldn’t say it any better. Citing data showing that a quarter of women who wanted abortions carried to term because of inability to pay, Johnson said, “It means that well over one million Americans are walking around alive today because of the Hyde Amendment”. He’s in the bag for the Abortion Industry and his choirboy face doesn’t change anything.
A few people at the event were Hillary Clinton delegates who were balancing their pro-life convictions with their support for a nominee who is in line with the party’s move toward increasing access to abortion in recent years. “Because if we have a right, and I think people have a right to health… but certainly the full range of reproductive health rights that women should have includes access to safe and legal abortion”, she explained in January at the Brown & Black Forum in Iowa. But he is wary of the party’s relationship with Planned Parenthood, whose president, Cecile Richards, spoke during prime-time Tuesday night, and described the platform as “reaching a point of irresponsibility”. “It’s another thing to say it’s a social good”. The pro-choice movement is about supporting individual decision making above all else, and if your decision is that abortion isn’t right to you, but you believe that everyone gets to choose what it is to them, then congratulations – like Tim Kaine, you’re pro-choice!
This is the warning coming from the leaders of Democrats for Life. The 2016 party platform makes no mention of “rare”, and Clinton herself seems to have dropped the word from her political lexicon.
In what was arguably the night’s most bald-faced reference to abortion, Representative Luis Gutierrez from IL vowed that Democratic politicians “will not stand idly by, because we believe Congress has to keep their hands off Planned Parenthood”. “Democrats have become the party of the Northeast and the West Coast”, Day said. She added: “The Republican platform is more pro-life than it has ever been”.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the party’s pro-choice components have consolidated power.
Day’s analysis contradicts mainstream views from pollsters and pundits about what is ailing the Democratic Party. There is little in the polls to support a more liberal posture on the issue.
Now Kaine is apparently going to inflame Republicans and their Right to Life allies even more by accepting a new Democratic Party platform plank favoring the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which has long prohibited the use of Medicaid funds for anything like abortion services. For decades, these amendments have represented a truce between pro-life and pro-choice camps on the issue of government funding of abortion, so abortion rights groups see the call for their repeal in the platform as a victory. “One Democratic friend said she was ashamed I was a Democrat”, Day said.
Abortion politics is unforgiving terrain.
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Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat who identifies as pro-life, wrote a letter to the platform committee to outline his disagreement. “I have traditionally been a supporter of the Hyde Amendment, but I’ll check it out”.
