President Obama: A pro-abortion president or a catalyst for pro-life action?

Remember those times Barack Obama was elected as president of the United States and a bunch of pro-lifers insisted that abortion would expand under his hands and it was the end of the world? Yeah. That didn’t happen.

Make no mistake: His abortion record speaks for itself and it’s not a very pretty picture. His affection toward Planned Parenthood is almost embarrassing, and his support for abortion rights is unlike any president we have seen. But the thing about extremists is that they tend to prick the consciences of others — in both directions — and in this case, history will show that electing a pro-abortion president probably helped the cause of the pro-life movement more than if we hadn’t.

The Huffington Post reports on this phenomena in this article, entitled, “Anti-Abortion Laws Take Dramatic Toll On Clinics Nationwide,” which details the increased number of abortion clinic closing “since a heavy wave of legislative attacks on providers began in 2010, according to The Huffington Post’s nationwide survey of state health departments, abortion clinics and local abortion-focused advocacy groups.”

The story reports:

At least 54 abortion providers across 27 states have shut down or ended their abortion services in the past three years, and several more clinics are only still open because judges have temporarily blocked legislation that would make it difficult for them to continue to operate.

And even the abortion industry says this isn’t the usual ebb and flow of business:

“This kind of change is incredibly dramatic,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization. “What we’ve been seeing since 1982 was a slow decline, but this kind of change … [is] so different from what’s happened in the past.”

Indeed, this dramatic decrease in abortion facilities, is such a tragedy to the abortion industry that NARAL, one of the most vocal abortion rights groups n the nation, thinks it’s having a very bad dream.

“This has turned into a nightmare,” said Kat Sabine, executive director of NARAL’s Arizona affiliate. “The kind of efforts the women have to take to get family planning or abortion services are just incredible, and you can only get care if you can get out of the community to do it. If you’re on a reservation or rural part of the state, unless you have reliable transportation, you’re not going to get care.”

The report continues to detail other alleged problems like the (very reasonable in all other aspects of medicine) norm of waiting periods between an abortion consultation and an abortion, noting 26 states require at least 24 hour waiting periods. But abortion advocates call the access to abortion a problem of equality for woman too, saying some women can afford to take off work, have reliable cars to travel to get abortions, and have other access to some lofty “abortion privilege.”

The reality is that the abortion industry wants an “all abortion all the time” clause so that every woman who even has a passing thought about abortion can be hustle to a corner clinic and kill the baby before the mom has time to actually ponder her decision. In no other industry is an impulsive life-altering decisions encouraged but in abortion. It’s a shame to us as a culture that we have come to encourage such things without thought or reflection, as if we have become a nation of abortion automatons.

When President Obama was elected the first time in 2008, pro-lifers reacted swiftly, and by the 2010 midterm elections, hope and change had actually come in the form of pro-lifers fighting for the rights of the unborn and enacting legislation that would battle the new president’s abortion support.

Only history will tell of the ultimate outcome, but so far the winner of the 2008 and 2012 elections was actually the unborn, some of whom got to live because sleepy people woke up from the reality that we had just elected someone who supported virtually all abortion.

While we long for pro-life leaders who help work with us to shape laws rather than those against whom we have to work to create new laws, we must realize that sometimes what seems to be the end is just the beginning

We have an opportunity to continue working so that after 2016 we will look back and see that, indeed, the nation’s most pro-life years post-Roe. V. Wade were actually the 8 years we were led by a man who supported abortion in all forms.