There's a new voice on Daily Kos, and it's not offering up the Party line. If you found yourself wanting to counter the anti-NARAL attitudes cultivated there, irishwitch is saying it loud and clear:

I have also heard people here complain about the demonization of pro-lifers by NARAL. I get their newsletter, and, while NARAL can occasionally overstate its case, it hardly demonizes the Pro-ife movement. In fact, it is a a lot less incendiary in its rhetoric than the Pro-Lifers are.

Let me start off by acknowledging that most opponents of abortion do so out of deep-seated religious convictions, and are probably kind and decent people. They are neither stupid nod nor insane nor monsters. Calling them names is wrong. However, while I respect their opinions and their right to express them, THEY are the ones guilty of demonization. It is the direct result of their view that abortion is murder.

How many of you have ever had to cross a picket line of pro-lifers?

And it goes on from there.

Also recommended is her diary from yesterday:

When Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, I did the happy dance. It meant fewer women would lose scholarships and drop out of college. It meant no more deaths from back alley abortions. In 73, I had my own pregnancy scare. I was using birth control religiously, but I missed a period. Turned out to be a false alarm,. but I now knew that ROe v. Wade applied to MY life, too.

My first job, at age 24, was as a research assistant in the state office of Midwestern legislature. My job was to gather information pro-actively on topics that the legislators would have to deal with. I intelligently concluded in 1973, that abortion would be one of those topics. I collected info from both sides. One of the interesting things I learned--and forced several pro-life Congressional and Senate staffers to admit--is that an amendment or law defining life as beginning at the moment of conception would effectively ban all hormonal forms of birth control--the Pill, the Patch, Plan B--because they prevent implantation in the uterus, which effectively kills that fertilized ovum--thereby making them a form of abortion. This doesn't get mentioned very often, but it's true.

A surprisingly large number of people here have been cheerfully willing to vote for a pro-life Democrat as a ploy to get back the house and Senate. Actually I am not that surprised--some Dems have been willing to sell out women since the day George McGovern chose to leave the abortion plank out of his platform ( I voted for Howdy Doody that year in protest). I am not among them. Abortion isn't the right of a special interest group--it's a WOMAN'S right, and we are a majority of the country, and a majority of Democrats.

Read the whole thing. Read the comments, too.

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