Washington's Abortion Industry Scores Hat Trick

Not since the passage of Washington's I-120, the most radical abortion law in the United States, if not the world, has the state's abortion industry achieved so much, so quickly, and with so little effort.

In a one week sweep they managed to gain recognition of homosexual "domestic partnerships", mandatory "comprehensive" sex education, and forced participation of pharmacists into the abortion industry.

Adding insult to injury, the state's largest newspaper the Seattle Times depicted the dispute over pharmacists conscience rights as a "political fight disguised as morality" and painted the honest and caring pharmacists who don't want to be part of the state's abortion industry as a "cadre" who were "simply tools in the debate over abortion rights."

Well, right off the bat--most people in Seattle figured out a long time ago that the Seattle Times doesn't know the first think about morality.

Second, the idea that this was a "political fight" is just laughable. The state GOP and Democrat party both supported the governor's heavy-handed demands. Republican attorney general Rob McKenna's representative to the Board of Pharmacy cut off all efforts to help the pharmacists. Luke Esser, the chairman of the state GOP said he supported democrat Gregoire's demands. Calling this sad turn of events a "politcial fight" is a little like calling the rolling of tanks into Hungary in 1956 a border skirmish. The pharmacists were at the mercy of the political powers that be from the very beginning.

Third, in the course of their reporting since the issue erupted in March 2006 the Times did not publish one story to highlight the independent nature of the pharmacists involved. No organized, sustained institutional help ever came to the assistance of the pharmacists. The Washington State Pharmacy Association, the UW School of Pharmacy, the Department of Health, the Board of Pharmacy among others, all supported the abortion industry rather than their professional co-workers.

The Times did nothing to report and inform readers on the financial ties between Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the BOP, the Washington State Pharmacy Association and Barr Laboratories. They did nothing to report on the true nature of Plan B's abortifacient effect or clarify for citizens the Constitution's First Amendment right to conscience. Neither did they bother to expose the lies told by the pushers of Plan B. Now that the state's abortion rate has started to pick-up since the aggressive introduction of Plan B in 1997, the promise by Don Downing of the UW School of Pharmacy that it would reduce the abortion rate seems like a grim joke.

To be sure, the media and the Board of Pharmacy were the real tools in this fight. But the fight ain't over.