Columnist Reconsiders Pro-Choice Stance After Release of Planned Parenthood Videos
Leah Jessen /
It’s been forty years since the practice of abortion was made legal, and a lot of Americans are either passionately pro-life or pro-choice, wearing their labels like bandanas around their heads.
Another group of people take a more sideline approach to the abortion issue, slipping their bandanas into a back pocket when necessary.
“It’s no accident that, in 2,000 columns over a quarter-century, I have never—ever—written about abortion,” writes columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. “I’ve avoided the topic like a root canal.”
Pro-choice Navarrette wrote a column on abortion that was published Monday morning in The Daily Beast.
In the aftermath of the “gruesome” videos released by the Center for Medical Progress showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the harvesting of baby organs—which made clear there is a possibility of aborted babies alive when they exit the womb—Navarrette is in the process of re-thinking his pro-choice stance, which he took during his freshman year of college in the 1980s.
He has reasoned with himself that his pro-choice view was “[b]ecause I’m a man.”
“Over time, I made refinements—going along with waiting periods and parental notification laws at the state level, and coming out against the barbaric practice known as partial birth abortion.”
More recently, Navarrette agrees with the assessment by the Center for Medical Progress, after a three-year investigation into Planned Parenthood, that the “barbaric” practices and human rights abuse by Planned Parenthood must come to an end.
Along with “scolding” from his pro-life wife, he has begun to form a new opinion on the babies that are being killed in America.
“As I’ve only realized lately, to be a man, and to declare yourself pro-choice, is to proclaim your neutrality,” Navarrette wrote. “And, as I’ve only recently been willing to admit, even to myself, that’s another name for ‘wimping out.’”
He called the Center for Medical Progress’s videos a “game changer” for those who are pro-choice.
“As to whether that means I’ll change my view, I’m not sure. I’m on the bubble. Ask me in a few weeks, after the release of more videos.”