Ballot Boxing: An unabashed, pro-abortion bid for the White House

The morning after President Barack Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, the presumptive Democratic nominee chose a dramatic venue for her first speech in her general election bid: an event hosted by the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.

According to its most recent annual report, Planned Parenthood aborted 323, 999 babies last year.

At Friday’s Planned Parenthood Action Fund event in Washington, D.C., Clinton set the tone for her White House run by assailing abortion opponents as unjust and warning that Donald Trump would set back a nation she claims is far better off because of legalized abortion.

For women, Clinton said legal abortion has “not only saved their lives—it transformed them.” Because of widespread access to abortion, she said, women were free to pursue education, careers, and “all the opportunities that follow when women are able to stay healthy and choose whether or when to become mothers.”

Since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, an estimated 57 million unborn children have been aborted. But Clinton decried that the killing isn’t even easier. She lamented the women who “miss work, drive hundreds of miles sometimes, endure cruel, medically unnecessary waiting periods, and walk past angry protesters to exercise their constitutional right to a safe and legal abortion.”

Clinton’s pro-abortion position isn’t new, but her public evolution since her last presidential bid is remarkable. During the 2008 campaign, Clinton told evangelical pastor Joel Hunter that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare—and by rare, I mean rare.”

Eight years later, she stood on a stage in New Hampshire with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and called for overturning the Hyde amendment—a law that bans federal funding for abortion through Medicaid. This time around, Clinton said abortion should be “safe and legal … not just in principle, but in practice.”

No mention of her previously emphatic “rare.”

This is welcome news for Planned Parenthood, a $1.3 billion organization that takes in some $300 million in federal funding each year. Despite a series of graphic undercover videos last fall showing Planned Parenthood officials haggling over fees for the body parts of aborted babies, Clinton defiantly vowed to Planned Parenthood: “As president, I will always have your back.”

She denounced Republican attempts to defund the abortion giant, and said if they “cared about women’s health as much as they say they do, they’d be joining me in calling for more federal funding for Planned Parenthood.”

Clinton hit Trump on several issues, but her contempt seemed especially reserved for his opposition to abortion: “Anyone who wants to wipe out federal funding for Planned Parenthood and end access to safe, legal abortion has no idea what’s best for women.”

Clinton’s choice of a Planned Parenthood event as a launching pad for her general election campaign against Trump underscored a disturbing political reality: Instead of simply defending abortion in a presidential battle, Clinton may use it as the tip of the spear.

Is Trump prepared?

The presumptive GOP nominee recently released a list of potential Supreme Court picks who have demonstrated pro-life commitments. And he’s said he would end federal funding to Planned Parenthood as long as the organization continues providing abortions.

But Trump has also said that apart from abortion Planned Parenthood does some “wonderful things.” Indeed, Trump may try to use this argument as a kind of middle ground to combat Clinton on abortion while not alienating voters who may support Planned Parenthood’s other services.

What do those services include? Planned Parenthood touts health screening for women, but it also offers free or low-cost birth control to minors—with or without parental consent—and graphic sex education for sexually active teenagers.

It’s unclear how much those aspects of Planned Parenthood’s agenda will come up during the presidential campaign, but it’s worth considering that abortion isn’t the only destructive practice the federally funded group promotes and performs.

Meanwhile, it’s also worth ending on a happier note about pro-life progress outside the Washington Beltway. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley—a Republican often considered to have a promising future in national politics—held a moving ceremony on Thursday to sign a law banning abortions after 20 weeks of gestation.

Surrounded by children, and holding a cute blond-headed boy on her lap, Haley signed the bill at Hidden Treasure Christian School—a Christian school for children with physical and learning disabilities.

Haley told the crowd that her pro-life convictions were strengthened by experiencing difficult pregnancies of her own, and by her gratitude to her husband’s adoptive parents.

“I am not pro-life because the Republican Party tells me to be,” she said. “I’m pro-life because all of us have had experiences of what it means to have one of these special little ones in our life, to lose one, to know what it takes and how hard it is to get one.”

Consider it a bright spot on a dark day when a presidential nominee chooses an abortion provider to launch her general election campaign. Thankfully, many children are spared, including Savannah Duke, a 15-year-old attending the South Carolina ceremony from a nearby high school.

Duke’s parents were urged to abort their baby daughter because she had physical problems. Her parents refused. Duke was born missing one leg. Today, she competes on her high school swim team.

Haley gave her one of the signing pens.

With crucial pro-life issues sure to fill the months ahead, we’ll end with an inspired meditation from another famous pen: “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”