The Daily Signal - How 'Life Is Winning' in 21st Century

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

How has the pro-life movement affected culture and politics? Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, examines that impact in her new book, "Life Is Winning: Inside the Fight for Unborn Children and Their Mothers." She joins the podcast to discuss how the pro-life cause went from “an orphaned political problem” to a winning issue "embraced at the highest levels of the Republican Party,” how women built the pro-life movement, and more.  We also cover these stories: The Trump administration announces plans to begin drilling for oil and gas in 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska.  Protests against police in Seattle again become violent, and police arrest 18 on Sunday when another riot breaks out.  Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot speaks in support of the city's police Sunday after violence erupts again over the weekend.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, August 18th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Marjorie Dan & Felser, president of Susan the Anthony List, joins me today on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss her new book, Life is Winning, Inside the Fight for Unborn Children and their mothers. Also, we invite you to take just five minutes to complete the Daily Signal podcast survey. We want to take your feedback into consideration. So at the end of the show, head todailySignal.com. slash survey. Again, that's dailysignal.com slash survey to give us your input. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back. In a letter to Democrats, Pelosi said via

CBS News, alarmingly across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the president's campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters. Democrats have asked that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Postal Service Board of Governors Chairman Robert Duncan come before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on August 24th, fast-tracking a hearing originally set for mid-September, which DeJoy was asked to attend, CBS reported. Pelosi added, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, one of the top Trump mega-donaution, has proven a complicit crony as he continues to push forward sweeping new operational changes that degrade postal service, delay the mail, and, according to the Postal Service itself,

threatened to deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion. The Trump administration announced plans Monday to begin drilling for oil and gas along the 1.5 million acres of the Arctic. National Wildlife Refuge in Northern Alaska. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told reporters that over the course of this oil and gas program, it could create thousands of new jobs and generate tens of billions of dollars. Environmental groups have long opposed drilling in the Northern Alaskan region out of concerns for climate change and the indigenous species that live there. Lena Moffat, the Sierra Club's senior director of Our Wildlife America campaign,

released a statement threatening to sue the administration over the drilling. The Trump administration's so-called review process for their shameless sell-off of the Arctic Refuge has been a sham from the start. We'll see them in court, Moffat said. The administration says a completed assessment reveals that polar bears won't be harmed by the drilling, but Democrats continue to voice strong concerns over the environmental impact of the gas and oil drilling. Protests against police in Seattle once again became violent, and 18 people were arrested on Sunday when a protest turned into a riot. Fox News reported that rioters through rocks and explosives at law enforcement officers. One officer received an injury to the eye and burn injuries to the back of the neck.

Carmen Best, Seattle's first black police chief, who resigned from the first black police chief, who resigned from the forced last week after 28 years said last week via Fox News. It really is about the overarching lack of respect for the officers, the men and women who work so hard day in and day out. The idea that we've worked so incredibly hard to make sure our department was diverse, that it reflects the community that we served, to just turn all that on a dime and hack it off without having a plan in place to move forward is highly distrustful to me. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot spoke out in support of the Chicago Police Sunday after violence erupted in the city over the weekend. Violent rioters embedded themselves into peaceful protests on Saturday, leading to the injury of 17 police officers and two protesters and the arrest of two dozen rioters.

Video released by the Chicago Police Department shows rioters using umbrellas to mask their identities from the police and one individual using. a skateboard as a weapon to assault an officer. Lightfoot joined CBS Face the Nation on Sunday to explain what happened. Unfortunately, what we've seen in cities all across the country, not just Chicago, is a continuing wave of protests. The vast majority of these have been peaceful, but what we've also seen is people who have embedded themselves in these seemingly peaceful protests and come for a fight. So what happened yesterday was really over very quickly, because our police department is resolved to make sure that we protect peaceful protests, but we are absolutely not going to tolerate people who come to these protests,

looking for a fight, and are intending to injure our police officers and injure innocent people who just come to be able to express their First Amendment rights. Activists such as the group increased the peace, spoke out against the actions of the police officers, saying the march was peaceful until CPD and other law enforcement agencies began an all-out assault on protesters. It's a critical time in our nation's history. Now more than ever at the Daily Signal,

we're committed to equipping you with the best information and insight we possibly can. And to do that, we need your help. By sharing your thoughts and suggestions through our five-minute online survey, you can help the Daily Signal improve our reporting and reach more Americans with the message of freedom.

You can find the search. at DailySignal.com slash survey. Again, that's dailysignal.com slash survey. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Marjorie Danenfelzer, president of Susan B. Anthony List, on how life is winning in America, inside the fight for unborn children and their mothers. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Marjorie Danenfelser. She's the president of the Susan B. Anthony List.

Marjorie, it's great to have you with us on the Daily Signal podcast. I love being with you. former heritage intern, so it's one of my favorite places to alight. Well, thank you so much for making time to be with us. And as a former heritage intern myself from just a few years ago, it's great to be, have that common bond together. So you're not like it over. Exactly.

You're the author of a new book, Life is Winning Inside the Fight for Unborn Children and their mothers. What would you want our listeners to know about this book? I think the most important takeaway is that to, understand two things. One is if you believe that abortion is the taking of the life of a human being, someone equivalent to you and me in terms of moral standing, then you have a cause that is the greatest civil rights cause of our time. And if that's the case, it's important to understand the political muscle that this civil rights cause has and to exercise that muscle to flex it at

important points along the way, recognize the political moments in which you should be stepping in and breaching the divide between our founding documents which acknowledge the foundational right to life and where we are now under a Supreme Court not acknowledging that and undermining that. Well, in the book, you talk about how the life cause went from what was an orphan political problem to a winning issue that really has been in brink. raised at the highest levels of the Republican Party. So can you talk a little bit about how that happened? Yeah, I mean, I think it is instructive for this movement, which is so central to all our rights. It's also instructive for any movement, any cause, any principles in which you believe

that have their basis in the founding and the founding documents. It was an orphan cause. You could witness that, and I don't think it takes much explanation for anybody who has really been following this for very long and cares about it at all. It had been the back of the bus issue for the Republican Party for very, very long time. The attitude was, let's get these guys. They do a lot of work during elections, but let's make sure that we hide the position once we get to a general election. And once we are in office, we can say, look, just stick with us because the best thing you can do is stick with the Republican Party because we're the people who will take care of you.

So once the people that we have supported are in their Senate offices or in the Oval Office or in the House offices, we come to them, activists, I believe, in the past, especially came to them and say, hey, we need your leadership on this issue. It was as if their friendship had dissolved or had been forgotten. That is something that a union, the NRA, tobacco farmers, any union or any lobby who takes itself seriously would not be treated in such a

fashion. And so I think really it's a story of taking this movement seriously enough to make sure that there was a system of punishments and praise and support and withdrawal of support for candidates and then elected officials who either support the cause or didn't support the cause. That's what politics is. So what was missing was that really strong political arm of the movement. And we're not where we need to be. I think we're well along the way. That's the story that this book tells.

Well, you also talk about how pro-life women in particular really helped build the coalition of the pro-life movement into more than a 900,000 strong group of grassroots activists across the country. Can you talk a little bit about how this happened? Yes, you know, I was working in the House of Representatives and I was helped create the pro-life congressional caucus. And my job was to try to corral votes of pro-life Democrats, which were, which were there were many then and pro-life Republicans to get a majority vote on any legislative matter. The thing that I saw as being one of the most prohibitive factors,

in getting ahead was how overwhelmingly feminine the pro-abortion movement was, how overwhelmingly male ours was. Now, I love men. That's the difference between us and the feminist left. But we needed really strong women spokespeople who were elected to office and could put it to the lie that said that somehow abortion was the great liberator for women.

And we really just didn't have that. So that is how Susan D. Anthony was started, named for the suffragists who was proud of, pro-life. And we built that. We built a team of great pro-life women. There is a pro-life women's caucus in the House of Representatives now, I'm proud to say. And we then saw we kind of had critical mass, not as not enough women, but at least critical mass. And so we moved on to the larger strategy of the national pro-life movement with that as a springboard. So something that has really impacted the abortion debate on a whole has been the debate over a partial birth abortion.

And so how is that particular debate within the larger context of the abortion debate really, I guess, signified it in such a way that that debate itself has really made a mark on when abortion is discussed and what that procedure is. How is that specific debate impacted the larger abortion debate? It's an important question because the answer to that question, Even in answering it, even in discussing it in public life when that was introduced long ago, involved a discussion of what the abortion procedure is. This is why I'm a convert to the cause actually talking about what it is. What is the object of an abortion?

The object is the death of a child. That is the purpose of it and the object of it is a child. It's not a frog. It's definitely not inhuman. It's definitely human. So that kind of conversation, but especially when it involves a late-term abortion and the grisly detail that one must speak of when you're explaining what a partial birth abortion is really changed the debate in the early 90s about what this, and early and mid-90s, about what this was. Because the problem with this particular human and civil rights cause is that it's hidden. We, and every other civil rights or human rights cause in our nation's history, you'd have pictures.

that were compelling, that were humanizing and just demoralizing to see how humanity could treat each other. You have the spraying down of blacks in the south. You've got pictures of slaves, their backs, the leather having, you know, slash great marks across their back, all sorts of horrific pictures of all other civil rights battles. But this one is the hidden one. So it takes words to describe, and now we have sonograms to also picture. But that has been the challenge, and that's also why, in later times now, the bill that we championed, along with National Right to Life, who started it in many states, is the 20-week pain capable bill, really focusing on the humanity of that child and what the act itself is. Well, how is the left's rhetoric about choice in women's bodies, something that is discussed a lot, and they use,

the left uses a lot of those terms when talking about abortion. How has choice in women's bodies affected the passage of the pain capable abortion Child Protection Act? Well, I think it's interesting. My body, my choice was and remains the mantra pretty much. That's kind of where the gut of the, of the movement. is they sometimes have better words in marketing schemes and words to use, but that's basically what it comes down to. And that is definitely where I was coming from when I was very strongly pro-choice in college. I literally said those words and believed them. I was a due change from pre-med to philosophy. And in that distance really started to ask some pretty tough questions about, well, doesn't

it beg to question to put it in those terms. So moving on to other terms made it much harder. You had to do backflips to get to this is not the death of a person of a human. So how has that the partial birth abortion debate, the late-term abortion debate, the born-alive debate where Governor Northam discussed allowing a baby to just sit there with no help in a failed abortion, really contrasts that sort of what I consider a very empty way of describing what's happening in abortion, my body, my choice. acknowledging only one person in that choice.

And then the other way, which is the death of that child, the manner in which the child dies, the what the eyes, ears, nose, eyebrows, fingernails, heartbeat, ability to hear a mother's voice and respond to her song at late, you know, just starting at five months. That contrasted, that beauty of that image, the sweetness of that image,

contrasted with my body, my choice, is very advantageous for just deeply human resonance and how we respond to arguments. Well, pivoting to more recent events, regarding the Black Lives Matter movement and all we see going on there, do you see an opening or opportunity as there's talk about the value of life, the sanctity of life? Is there good news there and a headway that you see, can be made when discussing the sanctity of every life? I do. I do. In a couple of ways come immediately to mind. And one is my great friend, the great Alveda King, always discusses this in reference to her

father and her uncle, Uncle Marty, Luther King, and in her own work in the pro-life movement and saying that we, in repeating her what they said, those men in our life said, which is that we're all one race. We're all in the same human race. We have different ethnicities that arise to the DNA and your skin level, but we are all one race. And therefore, we should be seeing each other with, through one perspective, that we are one

and that we are created in the image of the creator. And so when we encounter laws across this country that are called anti-discrimination abortion laws across the country where they're passing state after state, after state. It's a law that Clarence Thomas has said he thinks that it's important for the court to look at and they ban abortions because of ethnicity. Then we're talking again about a human and which humans get to live and which humans don't get. And the decisions we make as a nation about who lives and who dies. When we hear the quote from the dying George Floyd says,

I can't breathe. I also think of those tiny, precious black lives whose breath is extinguished, whose life has been deemed not worthy. And I think it's a real moment for us to support our black friends who are fighting this fight for unborn lives as well as authentic and beautiful lives that adults are trying to live. Well, looking at the response to your book, how have leaders, both in politics and culture, responded to this book that's coming out? I've been really so pleased and really humbled.

And when I say humbled, I actually mean humbled because I never even wanted. When I was back at the Heritage Foundation, I thought, I really don't want to get into that, you know, the pro-life business. I don't think that's what I'm supposed to do. But every time you say something like that, haven't you found that God hears you and like, oh, wait a minute, let me just put this thing in your way. So I really do feel like it's been the call of my life. And I've been so led by other people and by friends who have such a great talent,

almost always exceeding my own. But I've been pretty good at picking people to help lead this organization. So the response that I've gotten on the vice president has written the forward to the book. Sarah Huckabee has written a preface. We're getting all sorts of great governors and friends. good people around the country who've been involved in the pro-life movement for a very long time that we work with and that are so enmeshed in the story of this book that they see what their part and they see the truth of it. And frankly, it's such an uplifting great tale. And honestly,

the stories that are most interesting are just the people like the president, the vice president, governors, surprising things that they've done along the way to really make this a successful movement and therefore make it a successful book. So it's been good to hear those comments. Well, finally, Marjorie, looking into the future, where do you see more opportunities in the fight for unborn children and their mothers? I think we are at such a turning point in our country that the march to the Supreme Court is on,

that laws that really reach to the heart of Roe are being passed all over, and those are viability questions about whether the viability, standards should stand under laws in our nation. And it is, we are very, very close to overturning, chipping away, deeming basically as nothing, Roe versus Wade, so that then the true will of the people where we actually stand in this country can make its way into the law in state after state after state. And eventually it should certainly be for our nation as a whole. We are very close. We're much closer than we ever have been to being a pro-life nation.

That's because of our courts and that transformation that we've seen right before us. And so we're close. We're very close. We just need more like just an increment more of Supreme Court justice and a few laws coming across the bow at the court. And those are happening all right now. So it's a really, it's a moment of great hope. Well, Marjorie, thank you so much for being on the Daily Signal podcast and speaking with us today about your new book. Once again, it's called Life is Winning Inside the Fight for Unborn Children and Their Mothers. Marjorie, thank you so much for being with us. That was fun. Thanks for having me. And that will do it for today's episode.

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