Wendy Davis, Texas’s “Abortion Queen” and failed gubernatorial candidate, wrote an opinion piece for Elle magazine last month that is unintentionally revealing. Davis begins the article with the confession that she was once opposed to abortion. She explains, “When I was a pre-pubescent adolescent, I wrote in my diary that I thought abortion was wrong.” Like any thorough-going abortion activist, Davis refuses to articulate why she thought abortion was “wrong” and cannot so much as hint at the existence of a baby.
Nonetheless, Davis claims this fleeting moral position is the reason she has “always respected people whose perspectives on abortion differ from the strongly pro-choice one that I have since come to adopt.” Either Davis is willfully ignorant of the Pro-Life position or she is intentionally misrepresenting the reality of abortion. The Pro-Life position is, in fact, a recognition of the inherent dignity of every human life. People do not oppose abortion for reasons of arbitrary religious feelings. People oppose abortion because abortion ends the life of a unique, unrepeatable human being with a beating heart.
Speaking of hearts, Davis claims her movement to embracing the legal killing of the preborn was a matter of opening her own heart. She claims, “In short, I began living a life of empathy and understanding.” Implicit in her statement, undermining her claim of respect for Pro-Lifers, is her view that the Pro-Life movement is lacking empathy and understanding. She talks about her own abortion decision and the decisions of other women as reasons why abortion is necessary, showing a total lack of understanding of fetal development and real empathy for women. Empathy should not prompt us to tell women they must kill their preborn children to succeed, yet that is exactly what Davis does. Real empathy requires us to offer legitimate solutions to crisis pregnancies
Davis doesn’t dance around the subject; she states bluntly that in her anti-Life view women must kill their preborn children in order to succeed. She says that after legal abortion, women have the capacity to be equal to men, writing, “We [women] became the authors of our destiny. We made a bold step toward what it means to live as equal citizens of this country and of this world.” Open-minded, empathetic and understanding Davis then blatantly misrepresents the Pro-Life movement. Her hyperbole would be comical if she did not appear to actually mean the militantly anti-Life words she writes. Davis claims, “They [people in the Pro-Life movement]are dead-set on making sure that women will remain unequal in the eyes of the law, society, and the economy. Their success will devastate any hope that we have of living to our fullest potential.”
Would anyone really believe that the same Pro-Life people who staff thousands of volunteer crisis pregnancy centers across the United States that connect pregnant mothers to social, educational, legal and career resources don’t want women to reach their “fullest potential”? In the upside-down world of Wendy Davis, yes.
All of the ideological rhetoric in Davis’s article for Elle is par for the course with a committed anti-Life politician. What is enlightening is what Davis proposes as the next step for the anti-Life movement. She claims the great step forward is a repeat of her pink-sneakered filibuster of 2013.
What Davis grandiosely calls the “People’s filibuster” was a radical stand against a bill that would protect babies at five month’s gestation from abortion. The rational basis for this commonsense protection is that babies at that stage of development demonstrably feel pain and thus can feel the horrific pain of being torn and crushed to death in an abortion. The filibuster became known as the “people’s filibuster” because Davis did not fully run out the clock, and an unruly mob of abortion supporters, who later chanted “Hail Satan,” drowned out the Senate vote before the midnight deadline. Pro-Life Governor Rick Perry called a Second Special Session, and the legislation passed as the historic Pro-Life Omnibus Bill of 2013, House Bill 2. While some of the health and safety standards in the Omnibus Bill were struck down by the Supreme Court, most notably, the abortion industry has never legally challenged the protection of pain-capable preborn babies directly and the ban of elective abortion after 20 weeks still stands in Texas.
If an insubstantial publicity stunt is the best Wendy Davis and the abortion lobby have to offer as a way forward, this is a good indication that the Pro-Life movement is gaining ground.