OPINION:
The following is an exclusive excerpt from Kellyanne Conway’s No. 1 best-selling new book, “Here’s the Deal: A Memoir” published May 24, 2022, by Threshold Editions:
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE becomes follow the politics. People scream “Science!” when it comes to a paper mask on a five-year-old’s face to prevent the spread of a global pandemic, but not when it comes to a sonogram of a five-month-old baby showing a clear image of a human life, the baby’s gender, heartbeat, and limbs.
Religion and emotion do not tell the whole story. Neither do self-proclaimed feminists and prominent celebrities who claim, in elitist if not racist harkening back to the eugenicists who were the founders of Planned Parenthood, that this woman or that woman should abort their babies because “those kids would not have much of a life anyway,” all the while announcing their own pregnancies from their mansions while the stick is still wet, naming their “wanted” children months before their baby bumps are evident.
At some point, the fetus beat us. Science stepped in. Sonograms are scientific evidence that there is a real life inside a womb. The “facts first” “truth-seekers” pretend they don’t see a BABY waving back at them in a 4-D ultrasound photo. Radical liberal governors in recent years have expanded the time frame in which abortions can be performed in their states, eager to mollify the multimillion-dollar Big Abortion industry. But these governors are at odds with millions of their less-vocal residents. A growing number of Americans find it impossible to reconcile abortions being performed at twenty-five weeks while learning that babies born at that point or earlier are surviving and thriving. I understand why people are pro-choice, but can’t imagine many or any of them think sex-selection abortion or late-term abortion or pain-capable abortion is a good idea. Yet that is the Democrat Party platform. In 1996 their platform reflected President Bill Clinton’s famous albeit phony call for abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare.” By 2020, the word rare had been long removed. Now their platform states that they believe a woman should be able to obtain a “safe and legal abortion.”
I was thrilled to read that the world’s most premature baby had celebrated his first birthday. He was born at roughly the halfway point in a normal pregnancy. He weighed 340 grams, less than a pound, and could fit into the palm of a hand. Since he was born at twenty-one weeks and two days, abortion advocates would call him “uterine material” or a “choice.” His parents call him their son, Richard, and we should all call him a miracle. Such survivals are more common now.
The extraordinary scientific developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries extend to in utero intervention and medically assisted conception. Big Abortion denies all this, pretending every abortion is to save the life of the mother or because the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. Yet Planned Parenthood’s own research arm, the Guttmacher Institute, disproves this, widely citing the statistic that “less than 1% of all abortions are because of rape or incest,” even as 99% of their screeds included it. “Women’s issues” or “women’s health” is often a euphemism for abortion in political-speak.
Ironically, Americans who called themselves either “pro-life” or “pro-choice” in the conventional either/or question could gravitate to any of the first four responses in the second one, and they often did. They “live together” in that space. In fact, close to 60% placed their personal point of view into one of the first three positions (never allowed, allowed to save life of mother, allowed to save life of mother or in cases of rape or incest), which aligned more with pro-life views. When you added responses to the fourth position (no abortions after the first three months/ first trimester), some 75% of the country was accounted for.
That’s where most Americans were. It is not where all Democrat elected officials in D.C. were.
In fact, only 15% placed themselves into one of the more absolute positions, that abortion should not be allowed under any circumstances or that abortion should be allowed at any time for anyone during a normal nine-month pregnancy. Yet 100% of federally elected Democrats today agree with and represent only 15% of the electorate. Every Democrat should be asked, “Is there ANY abortion you think would be a bad idea or the ‘wrong choice’?” In polls, the most common answer to “What does Roe v. Wade mean” is “I don’t know.” The Democrats use that ignorance, which helps them tremendously, to frame any restriction to abortion as an assault on “women’s rights.” Although nearly three-fourths of the electorate do not align with Democrats on the specifics of abortion, the Democrats’ Roe v. Wade scare tactics works.
The Democrat position on abortion has become so unpopular that, according to a Washington Post study, Democrats did not say the word abortion one time during their 2020 national convention, while Republicans said it 31 times at theirs. Imagine that.
- Kellyanne Conway is an American political consultant and pollster, who served as Senior Counselor to the President in the administration of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020.
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