By Donald A. Collins | 17 January 2017
Church and State
Let’s be clear eyed. The dangers for serious errors on so many key public policy fronts about the Trump Presidency have yet to be manifested. The rap I hear from many moderates is “let’s see what he does”.
Fine or not so fine?? In my view Trump has selected many Cabinet people who are people of quality and judgment. Many, however, are subject to reasonable questioning. Examples abound.
Regardless of the influence some high level Cabinet officers may have, we know how insiders can make policy.
Example: we learn from the January 17th William McGurn column in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Kellyanne Conway and the Life of Her Party” that
Kellyanne Conway has just upended another Washington convention. She did so when she agreed to speak at the annual March for Life, one week after Donald Trump is sworn in as president.
With this one gesture, Mrs. Conway steals some thunder from the celebrity-heavy Women’s March on Washington, scheduled for the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. She focuses attention on big changes ahead for abortion policy. She challenges the feminist trope that to be a woman is to be pro-choice.
Above all, she guarantees coverage of a march the press would prefer to ignore, and gets the New York Times to report that, having “made history” as “the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign,” Mrs. Conway will now make history again as “the first sitting White House official to address the annual march in person.”
Reached by phone Sunday, Mrs. Conway makes clear that her appearance at the Jan. 27 March for Life is not just a matter of a White House official addressing a key interest group. She marched herself in her younger days, she says. For this mother of four, the marchers are like family.
“I consider myself a member of the pro-life rank-and-file,” she says. “Just one of the tens of millions of Americans who fear the cavalier way innocent human life is treated today.”
Each January, no matter how frozen, tens of thousands of ordinary Americans pack themselves into buses to come to Washington to march in protest of Roe v. Wade, the January 1973 Supreme Court decision that ushered in a constitutional right to abortion never mentioned in the Constitution. Each year the press mostly ignores them.
If we think Roe is untouchable (just remember the thousand cuts to which abortion on demand has been subject to, such as “late term abortion” which requires women to carry flawed fetuses to term after 26 weeks) even if Trump picks Scalia type justices, we better think again.
If the Democrats need a rallying cry to reset their fallen fortunes, a Roe v Wade reversal could be it.
If fly over America was lashing out at their loss of jobs in this last election, which by the way Trump can’t fix, since enhanced automation will be even more a feature of US companies’ practices, this tenet of women’s right of privacy, now 43 years in place, will insure that not only will Trump have a 2 year window before he loses control of Congress, but that many of his other issues will be so delayed as to make them un-actionable.
I covered this point in my earlier op ed piece, A Trump Attack On Planned Parenthood Would Be Strategic Madness.
Recall also that in that same piece,
So, Mr. Trump, you and the team of distinguished Americans you have selected to help you have a great chance to have a successful presidency!
But, just as sticking a broom stick in a hornet’s nest without having proper protective clothing would not be wise. That kind of stupid behavior is akin to what PPFA fears in this Post piece. Trump was right on the need to fix immigration, but a PPFA attack almost surely guarantees loss of Republican control of Congress in the next by election.
On the other hand, the execution of the positive programs noted above would be perceived as helping all Americans. Why needlessly put the short time any President has to do his primary programs in serious jeopardy?
Trump’s perspicacity in embracing the immigration issue was a huge factor in his winning the election. Trying to take women back to the back allies to dangerous abortion providers by upsetting what Justice Breyer deemed settled law would be an unwise decision which would needlessly alienate millions of moderate Americans. Please take a moment to check out my point with your daughters, Mr. President Elect.
Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.
From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013
By Donald A. Collins
Publisher: Church and State Press (July 30, 2014)
ASIN: B00MA40TVE
Kindle Store
Back in 1991, the NGO Don Collins founded in 1976, International Services Assistance Fund (ISAF), co-produced a TV quality 22-minute film called “Whose Choice?” which Ted Turner arranged to broadcast on September 21, 1992 in prime time on his then independent Turner Broadcast System (TBS). Other outlets such as PBS and several of its affiliates Collins and his colleagues contacted then refused to run it because of its forthright treatment of the abortion issue, arguing for all women’s right to choose not to have a baby. ISAF has made a new edition of that DVD. The purpose for reissuing this 3rd version of “Whose Choice?” was simply to show the historical urgency that attended those times, still blocked and attacked over 40 years after the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. This video is available for public viewing for the first time.
Conway on Abortion in US: “All these baby girls being killed”
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