By Carolyn Plocher
Culture and Media Institute
April 20, 2010

Newsweek must be worried that abortion activists aren't getting enough love. An unambiguously sympathetic article titled "Remember Roe!" by Sarah Kliff - a piece not labeled "opinion" or "editorial" - lamented the many obstacles standing in their way, including Democrats, morally-minded pro-lifers, and "lukewarm" pro-abortionists. Legal abortion, it said, is in danger, if not now, then sometime in the future.

"When the history of the 21st century is written, March 21, 2010, will go down as the day Congress cleared the way for health-care reform. Yet for those in the abortion-rights community, March 21 will mark a completely different turning point: the day when they became acutely aware of their waning influence in Washington," the article began.

Newsweek blamed the lack of political interest in abortion rights on the Democratic Party’s decision to "broaden its appeal by running an unprecedented number of anti-abortion-rights candidates in socially conservative swing districts." These pro-life Democrats, it said, fought against - or at least didn't pursue - expanding abortion rights in the new health-care law.

"[The new health-care law] requires separate payments for abortion coverage on the public exchange. The strict accounting rules could well prove so onerous that insurers drop abortion coverage altogether," the article read.

To Kliff, that’s not a good thing. "If Democrats won't stand strong for abortion rights,” she asked, “who will?"

This "predicament" has "weighed particularly heavily" on NARAL Pro-Choice America, the nation's oldest abortion-rights group. The article introduced NARAL as the organization that has "helped protect Roe v. Wade ... against countless legislative challenges." The article depicted NARAL president Nancy Keenan as a war hero outgunned but still fighting. She called herself a part of the "postmenopausal milita, a generation of baby-boomer activists now well into their 50s who grew up in an era of backroom abortions and fought passionately for legalization."

"This past January, when Keenan's train pulled into Washington's Union Station, a few blocks from the Capitol, she was greeted by a swarm of anti-abortion-rights activists. It was the 37th annual March for Life, organized every year on Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe," the article read.

It then lamented the lack of leadership among young abortion activists, saying that "millenials" don't view abortion as "an imperiled right in need of defenders." "How can the next generation defend abortion rights when they don't think abortions rights need defending?"

The misguided millenials, it seems, now view abortion as a "moral issue" (as opposed to their boomer parents who generally did not).

"Certainly, the anti-abortion movement helped fuel this shift in the attitudes of the young by reframing the abortion debate around the fetus rather than the pregnant woman," the article said.

It listed the ultrasound as a main weapon in the pro-life arsenal, technology that former NARAL president Kate Michelman said "the other side" has used "to its own end."

Although "public support for legal abortion in at least some circumstances hovers between 75 and 85 percent," abortion activists still face the "challenge" of "convincing the next generation that legal abortion is vulnerable."

"If they don't act to protect it - in the voting booth, at a rally, or with their checkbooks - it could well fade away with the postmenopausal militia," Kliff lamented.

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