The Bag of Health and Politics, "What It Means to Be a Pro-Life Democrat", March 31, 2008:

My reasons for being pro-life are many. First, I was born out of wedlock to an unmarried, mentally ill, 39 year old woman. My mother's pregnancy was considered high risk. She signed me over to the state when I was 3 days old, feeling that she was incapable of caring for a baby. She had settled on adoption during her pregnancy. I know very little about her, and I've never met her.

While it is great that my mother chose to have me, it is a shame that existing support programs to help mothers care for their children are largely insufficient. Programs like TANF and AFDC have withered under the false pro-life regime of the Republican Party. Republicans tend to be pro-life when a baby is in the womb, but after it emerges, conservatism says children must fend for themselves. According to America's Second Harvest, this nation's largest food bank, 12.6 million children go without food in this country.

The perspective of pro-life Democrats differs significantly from mine; I tend to view the criminalization of abortion as a tool of state power and accordingly am presumptively resistant to it. I imagine attorney ads for abortion defense, undercover agents busting GYN offices under guise of "pregnancy," doctors being ratted out by neighbors, the emergence RVs converted to rolling illegal abortion clinics to evade the laws. I imagine underground railroads once again taking people into Canada, where the Morgenthal decision protects a right to abortion under different jurisprudential standards than does the flimsy tissue paper of Roe.

But it's shameful how pro-life Democrats have been treated by their party, most notoriously when pro-life PA governor Bob Casey Sr. was barred from prime-time exposure at the Democratic National Convention in 1992, the convention that elected Bill Clinton. It's no accident that Governor Casey's son is now a vocal supporter of Obama; the snub allegedly traces back to Clinton himself, as is typical in political conventions when the presidential nominees are actually clearly decided.