When compassionate people see friends or relatives losing a fight with a self-inflicted problem, usually an addiction of some kind, always a matter of gradual self-destruction, they will often stage what’s called an intervention.
It’s time for those who care about the pro-life movement in this state, and beyond, to stage an intervention with Georgia Right to Life.
The breaking point came this week, when GRTL bucked the National Right to Life group and other abortion opponents and asked congressional Republicans to oppose a strong pro-life bill. Why? Because the bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy included the standard three exceptions: in cases of rape, incest or when the mother's life is in danger. GRTL supports only the third.
Anyone paying attention knows GRTL’s absolutist affliction is not new. This has been a long time coming.
Think back to 2010, when Karen Handel lost the GOP gubernatorial run-off to Nathan Deal. GRTL was particularly nasty in that race, calling Handel “extremely liberal” on abortion for supporting three exceptions and suggesting her views were shaped at least in part on her “desperate” (and unsuccessful) experience with infertility treatments.
I wrote then that GRTL’s absolute opposition to three exceptions was “an unconscionable mistake,” that innocent lives would be lost while pro-lifers chose purity over progress. Soon, I got a call from GRTL President Dan Becker.
Becker said I failed to see where the pro-life movement was headed in the 21st century. No longer was compromised progress acceptable (even if little such progress had been made, as I pointed out).
The 21st century, Becker asserted, belonged to “personhood”: full legal protection for life from conception to natural death. Just watch, he told me in August 2010, when Colorado voters took up a personhood measure on their ballots that November. Just watch.
So I watched, as only 30 percent of Coloradans voted for the personhood amendment. That was up from 2008, when a similar amendment there drew the support of just 27 percent.
In 2011, just 42 percent of Mississippi voters approved of personhood.
It’s true that almost two-thirds of Georgia GOP primary voters last summer backed a non-binding, personhood-ish measure. It’s also true that, even if that proportion held among all Republican voters in a general election, it would translate to less than 40 percent of the total electorate. If there are any pro-life Democrats left, they are very unlikely to push it across the line.
Here’s where the self-harm comes. In Washington this week, by opposing a bill that could curtail elective abortions in the vast majority of cases, GRTL not only divided pro-lifers. It also gave succor to the pro-choice side, which is only too happy to portray debate about any restrictions on abortion as more extreme than its own absolutism.
GRTL’s stance helped shift Congressman Paul Broun, R-Athens, from co-sponsoring the bill to voting against it. Among Republicans in next year’s U.S. Senate race, Broun is considered the most vulnerable to a Democratic upset. That is only more likely if the likes of GRTL push him (or any other Republican) into a purist corner. And any Democrat will be less pro-life than any of the Republicans.
Here in Georgia, shenanigans like the one in the final days of this year’s legislative session — when a hand-written amendment to ban abortion funding for state workers was tacked onto an unrelated bill in the Senate, only to be quashed by House Speaker David Ralston because it hadn’t been vetted for possible unintended consequences — mean GRTL has nearly worn out its welcome under the Gold Dome.
“[Its welcome] may be close to being past-tense,” Ralston said during a Wednesday interview, criticizing GRTL’s rhetoric and tactics as “over the top.”
“But that does not mean,” he quickly added, “the commitment of the Republican caucus in the House has lessened in relation to the sanctity of life. But sometimes you have to separate the policy away from the special interest group.”
If the intervention doesn’t work, more separation may be unavoidable.
