By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Is the oppressive load that Democratic Party candidates carry at the insistence of pro-abortion radicals like Planned Parenthood starting to become too heavy?
Arizona’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, longtime liberal Fred DuVal, seemed none too pleased with that burden in mid-October when he was asked about abortions for young teenagers without parental notification or consent.
DuVal sighed and went straight to the issue of parental consent. He opposes it, he said with the usual pro-abortion pietism, because “that then gives the choice of reproductive freedom to the parents and not to the expectant mother, and I believe the expectant mother has that. . . .”
At this point his questioner, the pastor at the non-Catholic Redemption Church in the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert, interrupted to point out that the girl is only 14 years old.
DuVal looked down, said “Yeah” to affirm his stand, and spoke no more on the issue.
If abortion enthusiasts expected DuVal to jump up cheering and waving pom-poms, he fumbled. In fact, by using and repeating the term “expectant mother,” DuVal probably set the pro-abortionists squirming.
Was this liberal Democrat’s conscience hurting because he knew full well that young teenagers — minors who lack legal capacity — have no access to any other serious surgical procedure, or even an aspirin or ear piercing, without parental awareness and consent?
What if, God forbid, the young teenager suffered some serious medical damage during the abortion, which certainly can happen, and her parents suddenly learned of the tragedy from a secret operation they never would have consented to?
On election night, November 4, LifeNews.com noted pro-abortion Democrats falling to defeat by pro-life Republicans across the nation.
Democrats who made some of the loudest noises about favoring abortion, like Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis and Colorado incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, were tossed aside by voters. DuVal suffered the same fate, losing by about 13 points to pro-life Arizona Republican Doug Ducey.
DuVal, seeking to become governor of a state with about 6.5 million people, had made an outrageous comment. However, extremism is the fuel of the pro-abortion jihad.
Anyway, it wasn’t as if DuVal had to worry about major news writers calling him to account. They completely ignored his shocking words.
If only he were a Republican opposing abortion and his name were Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock, DuVal quickly would have been mocked by media internationally from here to eternity.
Indeed, two years after Akin, of Missouri, and Mourdock, of Indiana, ran afoul of pro-abortion media in their 2012 campaigns for the U.S. Senate, their names still are hauled out as horrible embarrassments of opposition to abortion.
It’s the age of the Internet and social media, so DuVal’s pro-abortion bumble quickly got attention at such conservative sites as The Daily Caller and The Washington Free Beacon. But in the daily “mainstream” news reports that pummel most Americans, not a single word.
Those media so often are ready to assert that most Americans favor abortion, but when an embarrassment to permissive abortion arises, the editors sweep it under the bloody, bumpy rug, as if they can’t count on Americans to be really as pro-abortion as media biggies are.
At the online BuzzFeed Community, one critic of DuVal posted a list of 14 other things 14-year-olds can’t do without parental consent, including attending an R-rated movie, getting a tattoo, opening a bank account, taking a school field trip, receiving a vaccination, or choosing one’s personal doctor.
A week after DuVal’s comment, Laurie Roberts, a columnist at The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily, wrote: “DuVal’s comments — to me, at least — were stunning, and the most stunning part of the story? It wasn’t news….
“A 29-second video of the October 14 exchange is on YouTube and the story is all over the right-wing websites. But from what I can tell, none of the state’s major news outlets have reported on DuVal’s surprising stand,” she wrote.
Some readers may consider columnist Roberts a liberal, others may say she’s a moderate. But “activist conservative” wouldn’t be a description that fits her.
Still, the fact that political editors didn’t think DuVal’s stand worth a single word piqued Roberts’ curiosity — perhaps especially because even DuVal’s own campaign wouldn’t stand up forthrightly for DuVal when she sought an explanation.
Instead, his campaign manager, Bill Scheel, wanted to shift the focus to his Republican gubernatorial opponent, Ducey, for allegedly being an extremist on “the issues of women’s health.”
Roberts wrote that the political editors told her they were otherwise occupied, “and that it didn’t seem particularly newsworthy that a pro-choice candidate would oppose parental consent.”
Still, she wrote, she wondered if the GOP’s Ducey would have been similarly ignored if he said something remarkable on the other side of the abortion issue.
“My guess is we’d cover that Ducey story,” Roberts wrote. “The fact that we didn’t cover the DuVal story? I hope I’m wrong, but I’m wondering, does it say more about us than about him?”
OK, Roberts got her little moment at the Republic to question her own profession’s ethics on the topic. Then her words disappeared into the same void as DuVal’s.
Oh, if only Ducey had said something like, radical Planned Parenthood is like Philadelphia butcher Dr. Kermit Gosnell, then Ducey would have become international “news” overnight, and been swiftly driven into the same Hades as Akin and Mourdock.
Meanwhile, the left-wing, pro-abortion “Blog for Arizona” growled out its resentments against Roberts’ column, including asserting that Roberts must think children are just the property of their parents. Strange, but parents’ usual undoubted responsibility for their minors’ medical care got as pulped by the pro-abortion blogger as the aborted baby herself.
Instead of howling at the moon, “Blog for Arizona” might have started calculating the damage to the Democrats from the party’s grim insistence on abortion extremism.
After all, it was only in the 1970s that remorseless Democrat radicals stridently starting purging pro-lifers who had dedicated their lives as faithful Democrats. Get out and get lost, they were told. Thus the birth of the “Reagan Democrat,” who voted for the GOP.
It’s About Parenting
While even DuVal didn’t seem pleased at having to recite his party’s line favoring secret abortions for minors, a Latina Democrat in the Arizona House of Representatives, Catherine Miranda, quickly held his feet to the fire and noted that “as a mother, my personal values may not always coincide with my political party.”
Apparently concerned about some moral issues, Democrat Miranda has been edging toward Republicans. In early October, she endorsed DuVal’s gubernatorial foe, Ducey.
After DuVal’s approval of minors’ abortions without consent, Miranda issued a statement on October 16 saying: “I find it shocking that Fred DuVal would so quickly and definitively dismiss the need for parental oversight in children’s lives. His comments radically transcend politics — as a mother, my personal values may not always coincide with my political party, but we can all agree that parents need to fundamentally be involved in the choices their kids are making.
“This isn’t about whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, this is about responsible and active parenting,” she continued. “To even consider allowing a 14-year-old, who can’t legally vote or even drive a car, to make such a life-altering decision without parental consent is astounding. Fred’s extreme statements demonstrate why I am genuinely concerned about the decisions he would make as an elected official.”
On November 2, shortly before the election, conservative Arizona Republican political strategist Constantin Querard told The Wanderer: “I’m not sure if most Democrat candidates are tired of pro-abortion politics, because most really believe in it. It does appear that the voters are getting tired of it, though. Udall will likely lose in Colorado in great part because of his bizarre focus on women’s issues, to where the local paper referred to him as Sen. Mark Uterus.
“DuVal in Arizona almost got away with proclaiming his support for 14-year-olds getting abortions without their parents’ knowledge until social-media pressures finally forced The Arizona Republic and others to cover it,” Querard said.
“When the issue stops working for Democrats, they will start to move away from it, because the one thing Democrats hold more sacred than their sanctity of abortion is winning.”
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