Voters around the country yesterday demonstrated their aversion to extreme abortion positions. In South Dakota, they resoundly rejected the most radical abortion ban proposed in the states since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Introduced as a direct challenge to Roe, the law would have banned abortion in all circumstances unless it was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman. South Dakotans voted against the ban by a margin of 56 to 44 percent.

Voters also rejected harmful parental notification laws in California and Oregon. They recognized that the laws regulating minors' access to abortion would interfere with teens receiving timely medical care and put the most vulnerable youth in harm's way. The law proposed in California was virtually identical to one that voters rejected last year as well.

Kansans elected a new Attorney General, Paul Morrison, and sent the incumbent Phill Kline packing. Kline routinely abused the authority of his office to pursue a personal, extreme anti-abortion agenda, including a long-fought battle to obtain the private medical records of abortion patients. Once those records were in his possession, sensitive information from them was leaked to Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.

National Right to Life licks its wounds and prepares to regroup

As already outlined by Joan Bokaer, this midterm election has dealt a huge setback to the ambitions of the Christian right, and National Right to Life is feeling the pain.

About Last Night

There are several pieces of bad news. The House is now in the hands of Democrats whose leadership is pro-abortion, as are most members.

The genius of Congressman Rahm Emanuel (who headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) was to recruit candidates who made all the right sounding noises so that they could appeal in culturally-conservative areas of the South and Midwest.
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In addition, parental notification proposals failed in California and Oregon. Meanwhile in Missouri, voters by a narrow margin approved Amendment Two which places the right to clone in the state Constitution.

Finally, last March South Dakota passed a law that bans abortion unless necessary to prevent the death of the mother. ... Opponents secured enough signatures to have the law placed on Tuesday's ballot and yesterday voters rejected the pro-life law.

That's the short-term unpleasantness. But those of us--you and me--who take the long view realize that there are encouraging undercurrents that don't make the headlines.
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And Fr. Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, did an excellent job this morning highlighting the trends that continue apace, independent of elections. The trends moving in our direction include
· opinion polls about abortion
· the declining number of abortions, abortionists, and abortion mills
· the strong new motivation of our young pro-life activists who know they are abortion survivors
· the growing voice of women and men harmed by abortion, who contradict its promise of "benefit"
· the evidence in science about who the child is
· the medical evidence that abortion is no benefit to women
· the sociological evidence that abortion is no benefit to society
· a new wave of clergy who are more ready for the pro-life battle than ever.

The struggle for reproductive freedom will never really be over, at least not in our lifetimes.

Last night was tough, no two ways about it. But what sticks in my mind is a theme that more and more is making its way into the comments of abortion advocates.

Far more than does the media, and almost as well as we do, they understand that you and I will NEVER go away, NEVER give up.

But elections are like buses; another one will come along soon enough. And what we lost last night we will begin to take back then. Count on it.

As heartened as pro-choice advocates might be by the results of the election, we would do well to take NRL and friends at their word. For as Terry Curtis Fox writes at the Huffington Post, an entire generation of young Americans truly has no idea of what is at stake.

Some young evangelicals support gay rights over abortion rights

The Anti-Rights Democrat

I don't know anyone who was happy to vote for Heath Shuler, the Democrat who campaigned on the code words "our mountain values." Shuler will no doubt vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker. Given the chance, he'd also vote against gay marriage and against abortion.
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For people my age, gay-rights and abortion-rights (or opposition thereto) go together like a horse-and-carriage.

For my students, it's a different matter. Many come from those deep-red, evangelical hills. And yet while they acknowledge homophobic parents, a surprising number of them are not. Simply put, they have to deal with openly gay or gay-friendly fellow students and faculty members. To reject gays would mean to reject specific people they know. And that's something which a lot of them simply refuse to do. Young Congressman-elect Shuler may well represent the last generation to be fundamentally anti-gay.

The same is not true, however, for abortion. The same generational divide which is providing hope for gay rights allows for virulent anti-abortion sentiment. These kids may know gay students; they don't know anyone who has been covered with a blanket in the back seat of a stranger's automobile en route to an illegal abortion. They don't know anyone who's come out of an illegal abortion sterile or who nearly bled to death or was bankrupted trying to get the procedure.

In other words, there's a generation coming of political age who are either pro-gay or gay-neutral but deeply anti-abortion. Shuler half fits them, and he's far more likely to get an opportunity to vote his "mountain values" on abortion than on gay marriage.
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Abortion rights may very well become the rights which are left behind (or left segregated to traditionally blue states). If abortion rights and gay rights get a divorce, it won't be abortion rights which remain protected.

We've taken back the House; we have probably taken the Senate; we've forced Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. But just as Democratic power once depended upon the powerful presence of segregationists, the price of that victory has been welcoming anti-rights Democrats like Casey and Shuler into the party.

Depending upon how the Court rules on today's argument, we may all too soon discover whether that price will include women's lives.

Heath Shuler is not alone, but just one more Democrat in an already numerous and ever-growing herd of Trojan donkeys -- a trend vastly encouraging to the Christian right, even if most  pro-choice Democrats would prefer to keep their heads in the sand.

But Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is paying attention.

The "Big Tent" is swelled by the ranks of anti-choice Democrats

"The most surprising bit of data to come out of last night's election coverage was an exit poll by one of the networks which said that one in three voters who self-identified as 'Evangelical Christians' voted for Democrats.  I know that some Evangelicals voted for Bob Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania because they, wrongly I believe, felt it would even the score for the banishment of his pro-life father from the Democrat party. Some also voted for conservative Democrat Brad Ellsworth who is pro-life, pro-marriage and fairly conservative on a bunch of other issues.
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"It will be interesting to watch these new Members of Congress deal with presumed Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her San Francisco left wing of the party.  People like Brad Ellsworth are going to be as welcome in San Francisco as I am.

And some members of the Christian right blame GOP losses on the "Giuliani-McCain-Romney wing of the Republican Party" -- for not being extreme enough in their attacks on abortion

According to the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer of Human Life International, the GOP lost the Congress not because they've gone too far to the right, but because they haven't pushed their far-right agenda even harder.

"If the Republican Party truly wants to know why they lost, they need only look in the mirror.  The most vulnerable seats in both houses were those held by politicians who had abandoned the pro-life and the pro-marriage principles that first brought them to power.  
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Some so-called conservative senators were all too happy to water down or jettison their `unwavering' defense of the unborn in the name of political expediency and now they have paid the price.  Self-described Reagan conservative George Allen bragged about owning stock in Barr Pharmaceuticals--the manufacturer of Plan B--and President Bush's shameful support of this deadly drug being sold over the counter deflated conservatives' support of many candidates.

"In Missouri, Sen. Jim Talent fearfully refusal to come out against the state's cloning initiative not only resulted in its passage, but the loss of his Senate seat.  Sen. Rick Santorum's race in Pennsylvania is also telling.  Those who espouse `conventional wisdom' will tell you that issues like abortion never decide a race.  That's a lie, as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats purposely picked a pro-life candidate, recognizing that it would neutralize the greatest advantage Santorum had in his re-election bid.

"The Giuliani-McCain-Romney wing of the Republican Party is responsible for this overwhelming defeat.  If the GOP truly wishes to regain the trust of pro-life, pro-family conservatives, then they must look to leaders like Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.)--who has never wavered on his principles or his defense of the innocent unborn--as their model."

Grapes that sour call for a glass of non-sacramental wine.

[Title image: Sour Grapes, Sally Minker]

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