The Left-Right Conspiracy to Ignore Palin's Abortion Confusion

Pro-choice activists have been so intent on portraying Sarah Palin as a right wing fundamentalist whacko who's going to force back-alley abortions that they've ignored evidence that Palin is somewhere between flexible and confused when it comes to abortion.

Pro-life activists have been so hopeful that the Republican ticket is genuinely pro-life that they, too, have ignored evidence that McCain and Palin have diverged from the strongly pro-life Republican platform. Each time I've suggested this, I've been told by my pro-life friends that I'm looking for a gotcha issue where none exists.

Evidence I'd offered in the past included Palin's comments in the Charlie Gibson interview that the "states should be able to decide that issue." For real pro-life activists, that's the first part of the sentence, the second being, "and then the states should ban the procedure." (Oh, and by the way, overturning Roe v. Wade would NOT limit the decision just to the states as Palin and McCain imply; the federal government could pass a statutory ban on abortion, too).

Then, in the first part of the Katie Couric interview, Palin said that in the case of a pregnancy through rape she would "counsel the person to choose life" rather than, oh, banning the procedure, which is the position of the Republican platform.

Now comes the latest installment of the Couric interview in which she believes in a Constitutional right to privacy -- the heart of the Roe v. Wade ruling she said she opposes.

So what's going on here? In McCain's case, I suspect there's a deliberate effort to come off as sounding more moderate by emphasizing states rights instead of the primary pro-life emphasis of opposing abortion through statute or Constitutional amendment. Whether he's an abortion moderate who's tricked conservatives into thinking he's one of them, or a strong pro-life conservative who's trying to play that down during the general election (my guess), I think he knows what he's doing.

I had thought the same for Palin but after listening to the Couric interviews, it may be she just really doesn't understand the issue of abortion as a policy matter. Perhaps most rank and file conservatives won't care. What they've always loved most about Palin is that she gave birth to a Downs Syndrome child rather than having an abortion. Period.

But it surely must put them in an awkward position to have their pro-life heroine a) say she believes in the right to privacy b) say abortion should be left to the states and c) define her pro-life essence as being almost entirely about counseling women to choose life instead of abortions.

Any religious conservatives now willing to say -- publicly -- that they're worried? Any pro-choice activists now willing to admit that McCain-Palin are not exactly anti-abortion extremists?

UPDATE: Just got this email from NARAL Pro-Choice America. On the one hand, they cite Palin's "attempts to avoid the abortion issue." On the other, they criticize her "extreme, far-right opposition to a woman's right to choose." So the pro-choice way of making sense of this is that Palin is dodging and weaving in order to obscure her REAL views which are "extreme, far-right" (and also presumably, coherent) opposition to abortion. Haven't heard from the pro-life side yet. Isn't it possible that her most recent comments ARE her real views?

By the way, I don't really think there's a "conspiracy" in the sense that the pro-choice and pro-life activists got together and secretly worked this all through. I just think that they both, for their own reasons, have an incentive to ignore the reality of what's happening before their eyes.