Lost, part 1

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In: abortion, best of the web today, conservatives

I saw this column in “The Best of the Web Today” on wsj.com. Somehow, the last sentence was very profound to me:

Here’s a fascinating report from LifeSiteNews.com, a Web site whose point of view is obvious from the name:

The pro-life movement in America is growing in leaps and bounds, attracting young, zealous women to defend the unborn in droves–a fact that even the president of NARAL has now admitted.

NARAL’s Nancy Keenan told Newsweek last week that she considers herself a member of the “postmenopausal militia”–a phrase that captures the situation of pro-abortion leaders who are aging across the board, including the leadership of Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women. Newsweek’s Sarah Kliff notes that “these leaders will retire in a decade or so.”

Keenan also remarked on the enormity of this year’s March for Life in Washington, D.C., and, according to Newsweek, is troubled that such passion has faded among the youth on her side of the movement.

“I just thought, my gosh, they are so young,” Keenan said about stumbling on this year’s March for Life in Washington. “There are so many of them, and they are so young.”

The report cites a NARAL survey finding that, in LSN’s words, “while 51 percent of pro-life voters under 30 considered abortion a ‘very important’ voting issue, only 26 percent of abortion supporters in the same demographic felt similarly.”


What is behind this shift in sentiment? LSN, not surprisingly, attributes it to the moral power of the antiabortion cause. Newsweek and Naral actually make some concessions to this point of view; the group’s ex-head Kate Michelman tells the magazine, for instance that ultrasound technology “has clearly helped to define how people think about a fetus as a full, breathing human being.”

There’s a question here that nobody is asking: Where don’t babies come from? “Young, zealous women,” after all, begin their lives as baby girls. For a more detailed exposition of this theory, check out our 2005 article “The Roe Effect.” But here’s the short summary: If the next generation of abortion proponents is mysteriously missing, it may be because their mothers availed themselves of the right to have an abortion and thus did not become mothers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212303032885376.html

It struck me suddenly that there could be a LOT more people of my generation. (I was born in 1971.) Who have we as a society missed?