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Senator Edwards and the Unborn

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There was a time when newly minted Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards felt some compassion for an unborn baby.  As National Review’s Kate O’Beirne reports (view article), trial lawyer John Edwards stood in front of a jury in 1985 and “channeled” the thoughts of an unborn baby girl as he sued an obstetrician who failed to pay attention to the warning signs of a fetal heart monitor.

According to O’Beirne, Edwards took the jury hour-by-hour, speaking as though the unborn child were speaking to them through the panic of the situation. “She said at 3, ‘I’m fine.’ She said at 4, “I’m having a little trouble, but I’m doing OK’…At 5:30, she said, ‘I need out.’”  Edwards appealed to the jury with the words: “She speaks to you through me…I feel her presence.  She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”

Things change.

If the most important interest group constituency of the Democratic Party were still organized labor, Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri might be on the Kerry campaign bus today. But the most important interest group constituency the Party has now is the alliance of feminist activists and abortion providers. To them, Sen. John Edwards has sworn allegiance with no ambiguity whatsoever.

His abortion rights bona fides were on display, for instance, Edwards’ speech to NARAL Pro-Choice America at a banquet honoring the thirtieth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Edwards wooed the crowd by placing the “pro-choice” vision in markedly personal and compassionate terms.  “Tonight while we gather to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Roe in this room, somewhere in America a woman sits alone, struggling, suffering, anxious, trying to confront a decision that millions of women have faced before,” Edwards said to the hushed banquet hall. “She’ll call on her own experience, she’ll call on her own religious beliefs, she’ll call on her own sense of right and wrong, and she’ll make that decision.”

Without missing a beat, the senator then turned from Clinton-like empathy to Dean-like outrage with a rousing call to fight the pro-life movement in the United States from whom the right to abortion is “under attack.” Edwards said: “Justice Blackmun said—warned actually—a chill wind blows. That chill wind blows tonight.  It blows from the White House, the House, and the Senate.  These people believe that politicians and judges in their own wisdom are in a better place to make the decision that can so profoundly affect a woman’s life.  They are wrong, they are wrong, they are wrong! And we must stop them! And we will stop them!”

Those who dismiss Sen. John Edwards do so at their own peril. He is not, as one wag put it, the “Democratic equivalent of Dan Quayle.” Edwards has a compelling life story—despite the media cynicism about his overplayed campaign boilerplate about being “the son of a mill worker.” Edwards is also quite adept at appearing mainstream, which is often more important in reaching American voters than is actually being a mainstream.

When it comes to the question of unrestricted abortion rights, however, it takes more than a southern accent to make a man a moderate.

Only when we see how lost we are, we can find our way again. Only when we bury what’s dead can we experience life again. Only when we lose our religion can we be amazed by grace again.

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About Russell Moore

Russell Moore is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today and is the author of the forthcoming book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Penguin Random House).

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