In a video interview with Melinda Henneberger for Roll Call, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi talks about the Center for Medical Progress’s undercover Planned Parenthood videos, released last year. She insists they were “doctored” but then admits she hasn’t watched the videos themselves, only some of the press coverage of them. Pelosi dismisses the select committee in the House set up in response to them as the “Select Committee to Hurt Women’s Health,” insisting that Republicans have been “out to get” Planned Parenthood for a long time and really oppose birth control and that this is what defunding Planned Parenthood is all about. Pelosi also says during the interview that she is not for “abortion on demand” and even hates saying the word “abortion.”
(Obviously the forensic report that Alliance Defending Freedom commissioned never made her news clips.)
I’d like to think that if Nancy Pelosi took the time to watch some of the videos — complete with discussions of the demand for livers and lungs — and to move beyond her ardent views of those who oppose federal funding of abortion, she would have a deeper reflection on what more than four decades of legal abortion have wrought.
During the interview with Henneberger, Pelosi expressed compassion for the “painful” choice women make to have abortions, and annoyance at Republican men for even broaching the topic. I’d love to see Nancy Pelosi in a room with some Sisters of Life, with some of the compassionate, self-sacrificing women from the Gianna Center, FEMM, AVAIL, and Women’s Care Centers, to name a few. Remember Eleanor McCullen, the grandmother from the Massachusetts buffer-zone case before the Supreme Court last year, who, standing in front of Planned Parenthood in Boston, simply offers help and hope (she’s there before they go in and when they come out, too — her love doesn’t stop when someone walks through the clinic doors)? That could be some chat between the two of them.
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I wonder what Leader Pelosi would really think of a Louisiana law that makes sure women know they can choose life at a terrifying time — that they know what their choices are. I wonder what her conversation with Kristen Hawkins from Students for Life or Lila Rose from Live Action might really be like if she could break out of her ideological silo and caricatures on this issue. Or with former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, who not only left the industry herself — and wrote about it in her book Unplanned — but has a ministry to clinic workers, to help them leave. (I can’t imagine Pelosi wouldn’t be moved by Johnson’s description of a weeping nun outside her Texas clinic.)
Pelosi, in the Roll Call interview, references (as she often does) her Catholic faith as cover for her support for legal abortion. One of the tragedies and miseries of the politics around this issue is that someone like a Nancy Pelosi or a Hillary Clinton won’t truly lead, as women and mothers and grandmothers, on this issue — to make those “safe and rare” sound bites Bill Clinton was so clever to latch on to, even as he vetoed a ban on partial-birth abortion, real. Instead they insist we continue with the euphemisms and caricatures, and they carry the banner for — and contribute taxpayer money to — the biggest abortion provider in the country.
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Pointing out that her office used to be Tip O’Neill’s, Pelosi adapted his motto “All politics is local” into “All politics is personal.” She ended by saying that “it is important for us to not mischaracterize what this is about.” Bingo. I’m with you, there, sister. If only she would follow her own advice — and insist that the administration she has defended for seven years would, too.
#share#Last night, Paul Ryan had two Little Sisters of the Poor in the Speaker’s box for the State of the Union. Why were they there? Not because Republican men are obsessed with contraception. Because this White House has insisted on mandating sexual-revolutionary values to the point where women religious who serve the elderly poor have to ask the Supreme Court to restore their religious liberty. Let’s not mischaracterize things, Leader Pelosi. We’ve been doing that for far too long.
Next week, the March for Life will happen in the nation’s capital. The theme this year is about loving both mother and child, combating the caricature — a “lazy slander,” it has been called by some who know the lengths to which pro-life people will go to help women and children and families chose life — that Pelosi holds fast to about the pro-life movement.
Surely someone could get Pelosi to YouTube and set up some meetings to awaken consciences and forge a creative new path truly empowering women.
What a leader Nancy Pelosi would be if she sat down with some of these folks — or took a look at the One Life rally that will be happening in her home state of California the day after — and insisted on a better kind of politics, one that does not say the word “abortion” not because she’s looking away from the brutal reality of this most intimate, legal violence but because it’s become unimaginable, because women and families have the support they need to always embrace life. What leadership it would be to awaken consciences, something we’ve seemed to be on the brink of for quite some time but for which we have not had the game-changing leader — a role that Pelosi, if she really doesn’t believe in abortion on demand and takes Catholic Church teaching seriously, could play.
If Nancy Pelosi has a hangup about Republican men and abortion politics, I’ll confess mine about Democratic women: You could make our politics better. You could be beacons of hope and mercy — unafraid to say that abortion hurts, and to help with that healing — instead of guardians of an industry of death.
#related#Kudos to Melinda Henneberger for drawing out a little bit of reflection from Pelosi and informing her a bit more about an issue she takes so personally that she’s missed meeting some of the persons who could help her give birth to a different kind of politics. Surely someone in her orbit could get Nancy Pelosi to YouTube and set up some meetings to awaken consciences, and forge a creative new path truly empowering women, not using “choice” and “freedom” and “health” as euphemisms for doubling down on death.
Unless, of course, she prefers abortion. (But, goodness, who does, who could, if we really reflected on it and what it does to women and children and families and the soul of a nation? Most of us just want to know women have the support they need and do not find themselves in difficult and seemingly impossible situations alone.) And I will take her at her word. So, please, Leader Pelosi — or some other woman with substantial power and influence in the Democratic party — lead us out of this grave politics.
