 or
decades nearly everyone has played along in the semantics game. The
Feminist Left is "pro-choice." Feminists have long claimed
they are not so much pro-abortion as they are advocates of a woman's
right to choose. Safe, legal, and rare. Yada, yada, yada.
Choose what,
again? Oh, yes: to kill her baby. But we don't focus on that.
Until now,
when NOW's Houston branch decided to form a support group for Andrea
Yates, the woman who murdered her out-of-womb children on June 20.
It's hard to spin this one (although they try). Noah, 7, John, 5,
Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months, all were drowned by their
37-year-old mother in the family bathtub.
While she has
confessed to killing her kids, Yates is currently pleading not guilty
to capital-murder charges, claiming insanity.
Maybe the National
Organization for Women should join the insanity plea — along
with left-wing groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the
Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Murder Victims' Families
for Reconciliation, who all joined the Houston branch of NOW in
a pro-Yates press conference announcing the Andrea Pia Yates Support
Coalition on Monday.
The coalition
is encouraging people to donate to Yates's legal defense fund —
much as Katie Couric did on The Today Show earlier this month.
After the airing of a sympathetic taped interview by reporter Jim
Cummins with Yates's mother and brother, Couric told viewers where
they could send donations to Yates's legal-defense fund, with the
address displayed on television screens across the nation. Couric
told viewers that any money left over would be given to women's
charities dealing with postpartum depression and psychosis.
At the press
conference on Monday, Beatrice Mladenka Fowler of the ACLU blasted
the Texas county district attorney's decision to seek the death
penalty for Yates as "appalling." "Andrea Pia Yates
was mentally ill," Fowler said. "It's a travesty her condition
wasn't treated."
Supporters
say that since Yates was depressed, having been diagnosed with postpartum
depression after the birth of her fifth child, she does not deserve
punishment, but pity and help.
But while no
one is denying Yates was depressed and ill, is she really the victim
here? Five children are dead. Could that possibly be the travesty
here? Could the woman who killed them getting off possibly be even
more of a travesty?
If I ran a
non-profit political organization, the last thing I'd want to do
is publicly defend a mother who murdered her children, making headlines
as a defender of a babykiller. But then, that's what NOW has been
doing all along, isn't it?
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