Last weekend, I posted an interview with the head of Democrats for Life in America, which posed the question: “Is there such a thing as a pro-life Democrat?”
Indeed, some of them showed up at the convention in Philadelphia, and Roll Call‘s Melinda Henneberger has this report:
The pro-life Democrats trying in vain to point out the self-defeating down-ballot and state-level results of their party’s increasing hostility toward them were not quite as NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue described from the podium on Wednesday night. “And the people who so loudly oppose abortion rights? Let me let you into their dirty little secret,’’ Hogue told the crowd. “It’s not abortion that bothers them; it’s empowering women to live their own lives.” At the Democrats for Life’s quadrennial DNC event here, Caroline Fayard , a New Orleans lawyer running for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana, said that for her, being pro-life “is not just at the extreme edges of the argument, but is about equal wages and services and significant resources and support for our working families.”Related: “Is there such a thing as a pro-life Democrat?”
“We like to call ourselves ‘whole-life’ Democrats,” said Janet Robert, president of the Democrats for Life of America — as in anti-death penalty, too, and pro-services of all kinds for children, the elderly and everyone in between. “Being anti-abortion does not make you pro-life,” unless you also work to boost assistance in nutrition, housing and all policies that would give a woman confidence that “there’s going to be help” after she gives birth, said self-described pro-life Democrat John Bel Edwards, the governor of Louisiana, who ran on policies including equal pay and expanding Medicaid.Related: The week I left the Democratic Party
Waiting to get their photos taken with Edwards at the small Wednesday reception were four young women from the Pittsburgh-based Life Matters Journal , which 21-year-old writer Maria Oswalt described as a human rights news outlet opposed to “any and all violence against human beings.’’ All four women plan to write in a candidate this year rather than vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump because “it would violate our conscience” to support either nominee, Oswalt said.
Photo: Roll Call / Melinda Henneberger
And today we celebrate...