The 2012 Democratic National Convention kicked off in Charlotte, NC today and we’re learning more about their agenda as written in this year’s party platform and as hard as it is to believe they are even more extreme on abortion. It shouldn’t be surprising though since First Lady Michelle Obama spoke tonight saying that her husband stands for abortion.
Also they have an all abortion advocate line up including Nancy Keenan, President of NARAL tonight, with their primetime speakers. Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization in Washington, DC, responded in a statement today:
“This week abortion advocates including NARAL’s Nancy Keenan and Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards will stand on stage at the DNC and celebrate a position radically out of step with mainstream Americans: taxpayer funding of abortion for any reason, up until the moment of birth,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List. “Despite what these women will claim about the Romney-Ryan ticket, President Obama and his team are the real extremists on abortion.
“Not only has Barack Obama heartlessly refused to support a ban on sex-selection abortion and late-term abortions past the point at which unborn children feel pain, he voted four times to deny constitutional protection to children born alive after a failed abortion – preferring to leave their fate to the abortionist who, only moments before, sought to kill them.”
All of this accumulating with this: The Democratic Party now endorses on-demand taxpayer-funded abortions. This was done after efforts were made by pro-life Democrats to get the party to moderate their stance were rebuffed. “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”
The Weekly Standard points out how extreme this position is:
That last part–“regardless of ability to pay”–is an endorsement of taxpayer-funded abortions, a policy that President Obama has personally endorsed. Obama wants Medicaid to pay directly for elective abortions, and Obamacare will allow beneficiaries to use federal subsidies to purchase health care plans that cover elective abortions. According to a 2009 Quinnipiac poll, 72 percent of voters oppose public funding of abortion and 23 percent support it. In other words, public funding of abortion–a policy President Obama actively supports–is as unpopular as banning abortion in the case of rape, a policy on which the media have focused much attention over the past two weeks despite the fact that neither presidential candidate supports it.
Also they still are no longer seeking for abortion to be rare:
In 1992, then-Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton tried to soften the party’s image on abortion by expressing his desire to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” Although the Democratic party platforms in 2000 and 2004 stated the party’s goal is to make abortion “rare,” the 2012 platform makes no such claim. “In 2000, the Democratic platform said the party’s goal was ‘to make abortion less necessary and more rare,'” Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Boston Globe last week. “The 2004 platform declared, ‘Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.’ But even calling for abortion to be ‘rare’ is now too much for the Democrats’ platform committee, which deleted the word in 2008.” The word “rare” did not make a comeback in 2012.
It’s probably appropriate then that they also stripped any mention of God in their platform.