EDITORIALS; A "Real Image Problem" for Pro-Abortionists.

It's no secret to the very sharp, very perceptive people who read National Right to Life News that our opponents are in the midst of a profound reappraisal and refurbishing forced on them by a metamorphosis in public opinion, especially among the young. Once upon a time, all shadow of doubt had fled. Now they are plagued with anxiety.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, in another context, talked about what happens when an "undebated, unlegislated, unvoted, unnegotiated revolution" is foisted on the American public by activist courts. That is exactly what the Supreme Court did in 1973 when, like a cockeyed jeweler, it held a few penumbras and "zones of privacy" up to the light and, voila, discovered a "right" to abortion.

Author and journalist Cynthia Gorney was simply stating the obvious when she once described the Supreme Court as "the 800 pound gorilla - - it sits where it wants, it does what it wants." Untethered by a respect for the Constitution, the fetid writings of justices such as the late Harry Blackmun are a breeding ground for lethal mischief. (See "The Blackmun Papers,"page 10.)

But the fear and apprehensiveness is almost palpable, as you can glean from even a cursory reading of the other side or its legions of sympathetic journalists. To take one of many examples of how they feel besieged on so many different fronts there is an extraordinary piece that appeared at www.slate.com February 5 written by Liza Mundy.

It begins as a thinly disguised assault on the President's Council on Bioethics (described in the piece as the "Kass Commission," after its chairman Leon Kass), which has done some good work and - - from the pro-abortion set's perspective - - threatens to do more. Mundy describes the "pro-choicers'" fear: that the Kass commission "intends to use [an upcoming] IVF [in vitro fertilization] report as part of a back-door anti-abortion mission, further eroding abortion rights by granting the embryo enhanced moral standing."

Then, without warning, Mundy abruptly takes the reader behind the scenes: "But privately, what has pro-choicers unnerved is their own failure to face up to the issues posed by the profitable and ever-growing field of high-tech babymaking."

What's intriguing for us is what Mundy describes as the "internal tensions" within "pro-choice" groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Let me offer a lengthy quote that puts the dilemma in a nutshell: