EDITORIAL: Women voted for birth control

OPINION:

Planned Parenthood is patting itself on the back over President Obama’s victory earlier this month. According to Dawn Laguens, the abortion provider’s executive vice president, women were scared away from Mitt Romney with the threat that he would take away their birth control. Other, seemingly more important issues, such as the fragile state of the economy, record joblessness among women and the foreign-policy debacle in Benghazi, Libya, took a back seat for the 56 percent of female voters who opted for Mr. Obama, intent on securing their “reproductive rights” against a purported Republican onslaught.

In a postelection analysis hosted by Emily’s List, a Democratic political action committee, Ms. Laguens boasted that Planned Parenthood persuaded women to vote for Mr. Obama based on “hope and fear.” They wanted women to feel “a sense of assault” from the Romney campaign. The leftist groups focused on women who were less concerned about abortion but were worried about maintaining access to contraceptives. Those ladies were fed up with the economy and unemployment, but Planned Parenthood was able to “hold them in undecided” by making Mr. Romney “questionable in their mind.”

The scheme worked. The mere hint that they might lose access to birth control appears to have been sufficient to frighten a majority of American women into Mr. Obama’s protective arms. The straw-man argument Democrats created was especially brazen considering Mr. Romney never once threatened to “take away” birth control in any way. All the Republican candidate did was oppose the Obamacare mandate that will force employers to subsidize contraceptives for employees (whether directly or through insurance coverage) when doing so will go against their religious beliefs. The issue was never taking those products off store shelves but protecting freedom of conscience and religious expression, rights that are enshrined in our Constitution.

Feminists like Ms. Laguens and Emily’s List President Stephanie Schriock are crowing that this election year marks a triumph for feminism and for women. Continuing the Obama campaign’s nauseating focus on the female anatomy, Ms. Laguens described 2012 as “the year of women’s uteruses.” It is ironic that she would thus label women’s apparent rejection of motherhood, and troubling that any woman would celebrate this as a victory for women in general. The overall effort shifted public opinion significantly. A Rasmussen Reports survey last week found 54 percent of voters identified themselves as pro-abortion. Never before have so many committed themselves to the cause of terminating the life of the unborn.

Women’s frantic insistence on their right to birth control and abortion will play a huge role in America’s loss of its historic freedoms. Mr. Obama’s second term promises to bring more economic woes, ever-greater threats from foreign enemies and further division in an increasingly polarized nation. Instead of voting for their real concerns, more than half of the nation’s women yielded to scare tactics. In the interest of keeping their birth control, they ceded control of our nation’s future to a president who does not have our nation’s best interests at heart.

The Washington Times