Pro-life Democrats protest

The 2020 Democratic Party platform, adopted at this week’s national convention, trumpeted abortion as “vital to the empowerment of women and girls.”

But not all Democrats agree with that stance. On Friday, more than 100 current and former Democratic governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and local leaders signed a letter calling on their party to abandon its extreme policies on killing unborn children. They referenced polls that indicate 1 in 3 Democrats identify as pro-life. Gallup found that, as of 2019, only 39 percent of Democrats believed abortion should always be legal, a drop of 7 percent from the previous year.

“We are concerned that many Democratic leaders support policies on abortion that are radically out of line with public opinion,” the letter says.

The signatories include Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, U.S. Reps. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Dan Lipinski of Illinois, and state legislators from across the country. They express their support for the party’s efforts on voting rights, expanded healthcare, and criminal justice reform, but they note that pro-life Democrats contributed heavily to those goals.

“These accomplishments would not have been possible if the Democratic Party had in place a litmus test on abortion,” the letter states.

In late July, a group of liberal pastors, priests, and theology professors also publicly called out the Democratic National Committee for its strident position against protecting the lives of the unborn. They cited scientific evidence that life begins at conception and legal scholars who call the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that led to the legalization of abortion nationwide “bad constitutional law.”

“We note that abortion takes the life of the innocent, which is against Scripture,” the group said.

The letters, however, did not affect the proceedings at this week’s Democratic National Convention, but the call for pro-life stances continued. Created Equal, a pro-life nonprofit group based in Columbus, Ohio, has airplanes flying banners over the convention’s host city of Milwaukee every day. One pictures a 15-week-old aborted child along with the words “Vote anti-abortion,” while the other shows a dismembered aborted baby next to the words “Abortion: Black lives matter.”

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