Thomas Friedman and the Pro-Life Movement

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.