Why would you join a movement that tried to ensure your mother could kill you?

This post from Jill Stanek is too good not to share:

Newsweek posted an interesting piece on April 16, “Remember Roe!”, with the byline, “How can the next generation defend abortion rights when they don’t think abortion rights need defending?”

How ironic. As I commented to a millennial who wrote an article at RH Reality Check attempting to refute Newsweek, “Elise, just one question: What in the world draws you to join a movement that tried every way possible to ensure your mother could kill you, unrestrained by any law or regulation whatsoever?”…

I wonder how you’d turn that into a recruitment slogan…

And some highlights from the article itself:

NARAL president Nancy Keenan had grown fearful about the future of her movement even before the health-care debate. Keenan considers herself part of the “postmenopausal militia,” a generation of baby-boomer activists now well into their 50s….

[W]hat worries Keenan is that she just doesn’t see a passion among the post-Roe generation – at least, not among those on her side.

This past January, when Keenan’s train pulled into Washington’s Union Station… 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. “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young,” Keenan recalled. “There are so many of them, and they are so young.” March for Life estimates it drew 400k activists to the Capitol this year. An anti-Stupak rally two months earlier had about 1,300 attendees.

[...]

Millennials also came of age as ultrasounds provided increasingly clear pictures of fetal development. “The technology has clearly helped to define how people think about a fetus as a full, breathing human being,” admits former NARAL president Kate Michelman. “The other side has been able to use the technology to its own end.”…

[W]ithin the abortion-rights community there’s a growing consensus on a promising path forward: start an open discussion about the moral, ethical, and emotional complexity of abortion that would be more likely to resonate with young Americans. “It’s a morally complex issue that both sides have tried to make black and white,” says Greenberg. “We have to recognize the moral complexity.”

Abortion-rights activists have traditionally hesitated on this front, viewing it as a slippery slope toward their own defeat. Instead, they often go to extremes to fend off even the smallest encroachments, opposing popular restrictions like parental-notification laws and bans on late-term procedures. Lately, though, Keenan has been more convinced that NARAL must adopt a more nuanced stance. On the 35th anniversary of Roe… she bluntly told a crowd… in Austin, TX… that “our reluctance to address the moral complexity of this debate is no longer serving our cause or our country well. In our silence, we have ceded moral ground.”

Of course, though abortion is often extremely complex emotionally, psychologically or even practically speaking, it’s not morally complex—is the unborn a human person or not? The reason that abortion advocates are so hesitant to address the moral complexity is that it’s hard to admit there’s anything wrong with abortion unless we’re talking about the unborn as a human person, in which case… how can we justify elective abortion to begin with?

Oh, and one other thing worth pointing out regarding NARAL: the last surviving founding member is now pro-life.