American Catholic writes:

Here’s a cutting edge, thinking outside the box idea for how to reduce abortion: give America’s largest abortion provider millions (more) in taxpayer money. With this extra cash, businesses like Planned Parenthood could help women avoid abortion, leading to an overall decline in the abortion rate. Skeptical? Well, that just means you’re a militant.
That, at any rate, is the argument made by a recent William Saletan article in Slate.

Saletan’s rhetorical strategy is puzzling. It’s one thing to attempt to create a new “common ground” on abortion by getting pro-lifers to embrace a strategy for fighting it that will seem, to most of them, paradoxical. It’s another to act as though it’s the most straightforwardly logical thing in the world for pro-lifers to do that and then demonize the critics of this common ground as “militants.” But that’s Saletan’s tack.

I agree with the criticisms of Saletan’s article made by Rick Garnett and by that American Catholic site (h/t Garnett). I will make four additional points, each relatively minor in itself but together suggesting that Saletan isn’t in this piece reaching his usual high standards.

First, Saletan’s attempt to claim that pro-lifers are deeply divided, and that the National Right to Life Committee is the “militant old guard of the pro-life movement,” will be more persuasive when he can come up with a comparably influential pro-life group or set of activists on the other side of this alleged pro-life divide. Joel Hunter isn’t quite enough.

Second, Saletan insinuates that the “militants” slam Catholics who favor his approach to abortion policy as “‘fake’ Catholic[s].” Follow his links: That’s a distortion of quotes from one website.

Third, Saletan attributes to the militants–and specifically to NRLC official Douglas Johnson–the view that “any pro-life bill involving a pro-choicer is a ’scam.’” Johnson has not said any such thing, nor does he believe it: He worked for years to ban partial-birth abortion, which involved a lot of collaboration with pro-choicers.

Fourth, Saletan makes it sound as though the militants are persecuting poor Rep. Tim Ryan for his open-mindedness even though “Ryan has stood up for unborn life, vote after vote after vote after vote.” Oh come on: He’s not Henry Hyde. He’s not Bart Stupak. The votes Saletan mentions are a few years old, or required no particular courage even from Democrats, or, typically, both. Here’s what I wrote about Rep. Ryan earlier this year: “Even though Ryan presents himself as a pro-lifer, he did not cast a single pro-life vote in the last Congress. He broke with pro-lifers on stem-cell funding, on cloning, on foreign aid, and, of course, on Planned Parenthood funding. Nowadays his allegedly ‘pro-life’ advocacy consists entirely of working with Congresswoman DeLauro to funnel more money to abortion providers.”