Posted on April 29, 2007

by

Daniel Clark

According to the April 14^th London Evening Standard, abortion industry insiders are blaming the decline in the number of abortionists on "the lack of 'glamour' involved in the work." That's the opinion of a spokesman for England's largest chain of abortion clinics, who explains, "It's not glamorous work for doctors, which may partly explain the increasing difficulty in recruitment over the last five or six years."

The chief executive of the spookily titled British Pregnancy Advisory Service agrees that "it may not be the most glamorous medical specialty on the face of it." A spokeswoman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists adds, "It is not a sexy area."

Got that? It's not that there's anything morally repugnant about abortion; it's just that the abortionists must have hired a bad p.r. firm. All they probably need is a shapely spokesmodel or a catchy jingle, or a wisecracking lizard on TV.

But how can this be, when the glamour industry is so overwhelmingly in favor of abortion? There have already been countless attempts to glamorize it, including the casting of Michael Caine as a heroic abortionist in the John Irving film, Cider House Rules. Over the years, so-called "abortion providers" have been the object of fundraising benefits by giants of the music industry, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Neil Young and Pearl Jam, to (as if you hadn't already guessed) Sheryl Crow.

Moreover, if a president who was a horny, baggy-eyed, red-nosed, potato-shaped lawyer from Arkansas had been pro-life, you'd better believe the news and pop media would have portrayed him as a geek, a hick and a pervert. It was only due to President Clinton's pro-abortion absolutism that Hollywood treated him as the second coming of Cary Grant, instead of Pee Wee Herman.

Even the popularization of the term "abortion doctor" is something of a public relations coup. We don't generally call somebody a doctor unless he acts as one, regardless of whether or not he's got a doctorate degree. If your dentist sawed off your foot, that wouldn't make him a foot doctor. Neither is somebody a doctor who performs a procedure whose very aim is to produce a human corpse. Nevertheless, abortion foes have largely conceded this point, thus allowing abortionists to masquerade as practitioners of the healing arts.

Yet despite all the good publicity, abortionists remain "not glamorous." It seems that nobody finds them as cool as Michael Caine after all. For all it matters, that film might as well have cast somebody like Willem Dafoe, or maybe Steve Buscemi, who could bring the appropriate creepiness to the part.

There are plenty of legitimate fields of medicine that are not glamorous either, but we don't read news articles bemoaning the dearth of urologists and proctologists, for example. For that matter, there are few jobs in the world less glamorous than telemarketing, but no sane person would argue that there are not enough telemarketers in the world. There must, therefore, be some less superficial explanation for the dwindling number of abortionists.

Maybe a pro-abortion activist can successfully hide from the truth behind soothing euphemisms like "choice" and "reproductive freedom," but the person who physically carries out the act cannot. While he's destroying and disposing of the tiny human bodies, he can't escape the reality of it by shutting his eyes, clasping his hands over his ears and singing "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Unlike his celebrity supporters from the land of make-believe, he has no happy place to which he can escape.

It's no great mystery that talented young doctors would rather use their skills to heal rather than slaughter. This is the natural result of a common human characteristic, known to those of us outside the pro-abortion movement as a "conscience," and known within feminist circles as a devious mind-control device designed to perpetuate patriarchal tyranny.

To complain that abortionists are unpopular because they're not glamorous or sexy is like saying that the fictitious villain Grendel was hated because he had bad breath. In both cases, the negative attributes are merely the residue of the characters' ghoulish behavior. The problem with Grendel was that he was a man-eating monster, not just that he was in dire need of a couple tic-tacs. Likewise, the abortionists' image problem is inextricable from the horror of abortion itself.

The leaders of Britain's pro-abortion establishment talk as if they're completely oblivious to this fact. Then again, they probably also think that English cuisine has been the victim of an ineffective marketing campaign.

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