Thomas Friedman’s latest column in the New York Times is a perfect specimen of what Helen Alvaré has termed “the lazy slander of the pro-life cause.”
While Friedman’s editors have corrected his laughable biological error since the column’s initial publication, they have not yet seen fit to remove its expansion of the term “pro-life” to the point of meaninglessness, its conflation of government support with charitable work, or its tendentious mis-representation of the pro-life movement.
The sentence I call tendentious is this: “Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.”
Friedman, like most liberals, seems to think that most anti-abortion Americans stop caring about babies the moment they exit the womb. For a rebuttal of that and other oft-heard but false claims about the pro-life movement, I highly recommend Helen Alvaré’s aforementioned piece on Public Discourse.
Update: Ryan T. Anderson, Greg Pfundstein, and Matthew Schmitz also deserve credit for contributing to Helen Alvaré’s piece. Apologies for my omission.
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