…as a result of those Center for Medical Progress videos and Planned Parenthood’s response to them. But not just because of that.

I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of abortion, though it’s always struck me that this is something you’re never going to put a stop to until technology changes and/or society changes with it. What I used to say was that the abortion argument would go away when there would be the technology to perform some sort of “in vitro adoption” on a mass scale – couple that with the sharing economy and before very long you have a perfectly good market solution that makes abortion wasteful and unnecessary along with immoral and sad.

And so my position vis-a-vis the hardcore pro-life crowd was to tell them to knock it down a little before the fish get scared away.

Not that I disagreed with them at all. Abortion just wasn’t my issue. I took what you might consider a RINO-ish position on it – let’s not lose elections because we come off as too stringent on something that will create a narrative of our side as uncool and mean and intolerant.

Four things have changed my mind and now I’m coming to a point where I’m for assaulting the abortion industry and lobby on every front.

The first thing was that I started paying attention to how the Left operates where it comes to talking about their political opponents not just on the abortion issue but on every issue. All the Left does is call people names rather than actually debate anything, which means no matter what you do you’re going to get demonized and insulted by those people. And if what they say isn’t actually accurate, who cares? They’ll just lie anyway, so moderating your position on a given issue, and abortion in particular for the purposes of this discussion, doesn’t avail you anything. You had might as well get your money’s worth and effect real change if you can (or bust your head open trying), because the Left will make you pay a political and social price for having any position that disagrees with theirs no matter how strong it is.

We’re seeing a pretty good example of that with the CMP/Planned Parenthood fight. Planned Parenthood has the temerity to run around calling the Center for Medical Progress people “violent” when their employees are on film joking over broken pieces of a dead human being. It’s a breathtaking bit of shamelessness, but we’ve largely become immune to this sort of thing thanks to how often we see it.

Decent people are very uncomfortable with the kind of abuse the Left will throw their way, and being treated in such a fashion will very often induce them to changing their behavior in an effort to make it stop. That gives the Left a lot of power, and a few decades of this has created this system of political correctness and cultural aggression which has so many people who are not just activist conservatives but regular folks disgusted with the way society is right now. The abortion industry and its allies operate very much within this pattern – if you express reservations about your tax dollars going to Planned Parenthood they’ll accuse you of everything under the sun, including desiring that women be assaulted with coathangers in back alleys. It’s disgraceful, and because it is you’re forced to either have their position, no position or a position as strongly held opposite theirs as they hold. Moderate disagreement isn’t an option with these people.

The second thing which moved me in the direction of a more pro-life position was, believe it or not, experiences I’ve had on the dating scene.

I don’t talk about this stuff too often here at the site, but I’m single and I hate it, and the main reason I’m still single is how absolutely awful the whole process of dating is. I go on lots of first dates, at least I’ll do that for a while and then I get depressed about it and back away, but not that many second dates. And since I started doing the Hayride what I notice tends to make a lot of the first dates unworthy of second dates is politics. I don’t require whoever ends up being Mrs. MacAoidh to share my politics; in fact, what would be cool is if we don’t really even talk about the subject all that much. But when I get asked what I do for a living and I say I do this, far too often it’s like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube not getting into a political discussion.

And single women between, say, 28 and 40 tend to be liberals, and what’s more they tend to be outspoken about it. And guess what issue makes them that way.

If I’ve had the discussion that opens with “So you’re one of those men who would tell me I can’t have an abortion, right?” once, I’ve had it a hundred times. This is on a date, understand. It’s so awful I’m at the point where I’m signalling for the check when I see it coming. Because what it comes down to is this – if I get serious enough with somebody I’m dating that sex enters into the picture, which at this point in my life means “pretty serious,” then starting a family is very much in my thoughts. And no, I’m not comfortable with the idea that something which is my flesh and blood, created as a result of a joining together with somebody I like enough to at least consider marrying, could end up in pieces on a plate being picked over for spare parts. Or flushed down a commode in some charnel house with fluorescent lighting and elevator music playing in the background.

Before I’m done I want to be a father. I’m looking for better than pieces on a plate. And while my personal experiences aren’t generally something I want to legislate, I also can’t support this abortion-on-demand business whereby someone I think I love would decide for whatever reason to find the nearest Kermit Gosnell impersonator and chop a kid I’d sacrifice and die for (and my parents, who damn well deserve to be grandparents, would similarly do the same) into bits. And being berated for that opinion by people I’m buying drinks for who at the same time gripe about how there are no good guys out there has made me less interested in seeing the other side. I’m done; they’re horrible. Just shut up.

Third was the Gosnell thing and the smart way the pro-life side reacted to it.

Kermit Gosnell to this day doesn’t understand why he’s in jail. As far as he can tell he only did what lots of abortionists do, and the fact he got put in jail has to do with his being black more than anything else. The nice white abortionists in the suburbs aren’t in jail and he is. And here’s the thing – Gosnell isn’t really wrong. He’s a sicko and he certainly shouldn’t leave that cell, but fundamentally he was chopping up somebody’s flesh and blood all day just like the nice white abortionists in the suburbs do.

That’s what that industry is about. They kill kids, and they lie their asses off about it. At some point you’ve got to stop and recognize this industry for what it is.

After the Gosnell case hit the public’s notice, the pro-life side started recognizing where their opportunities were and began making moves to actually win on the issue.

For the longest time, the abortion issue was about Roe v. Wade, which is one of the worst pieces of case law in Western jurisprudence based on absolutely zero law at all and you’re either a fool or a liar if you disagree regardless of whether you think abortion ought to be legal. The pro-life side sat around making demands that Republican presidents get judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, because that was going to change everything. And for decades finding that fifth justice on the Supreme Court who would make all their dreams came true never materialized.

But finally, somebody had the idea that pregnant women needed to see an ultrasound. When you see your baby in there, and you see it with the picture ultrasound technology generates, you’ve got to be one heartless bitch to want to kill it. We have those in this society, but not all that many – and attitudes are changing for the better as a result of technology. And in some places those ultrasounds are required, which is a good thing.

And then you’ve got laws like the one Texas passed, which we’ve copied to an extent in Louisiana, which take advantage of another feature technology has brought to the table. Namely, that modern medicine can make a 20-week old fetus survivable outside the womb. That’s a viable human being in there, which eliminates this business of a hard call as to when a fetus should be considered a life. That’s a big philosophical question in the general sense, but for the purposes of policy and legality it works pretty well to say that if that kid could live outside the womb you damn sure can’t kill it in there.

All of a sudden the extreme position is the one Planned Parenthood and the Left take, which is that it’s not a kid until you take it home from the hospital. If that’s your position you’re a monster. This isn’t some ‘I can do what I want with my body” argument, which under different circumstances I’d agree with. When late-term abortions essentially consist of killing that baby and then delivering it, and the baby could come out of there alive on its way to placement with some family that otherwise has to camp out in some Eastern European or otherwise Third World craphole trying to adopt an orphan, you don’t have an argument.

The 20-week laws aren’t the end-all, be-all of the pro-life movement. But they’re clear winners; it’s impossible to argue against them without having the extreme Planned Parenthood position. What’s more, they put to bed the pro-abort side’s favorite arguments about “rape and incest” – if you get five months to sort through that issue, I don’t want to hear about rape or incest. At five months that’s a viable human being, and it’s not at fault for how it came to be. I am not going to fault a woman who’s been raped for deciding not to go through with a pregnancy – that is asking far more than I ever would. But I don’t think five months is an unreasonable window in which to make that decision; not when there’s a kid in there who could live outside of there. So if the 20-week law is the standard we’re done with the Left’s pet hard cases they use to defend abortion at any time.

And now we have these videos, which don’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know about Planned Parenthood. That’s an organization begun by a genocidal racist which has deliberately preyed on minority communities, and it tells the kinds of lies your standard lefty only fantasizes about evil Wall Street corporations telling. Now we know, with pretty difficult evidence to contradict, that what Planned Parenthood really amounts to is a criminal billionaire outfit which takes hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to dupe women into killing their kids for spare parts they’re selling. And when someone comes along to show this to the American people, the Democrat politicians that criminal billionaire outfit has bought turn around and begin a criminal investigation into the whistleblowers.

To hell with that. I’ve had my time looking for some way to find compromise on the issue and hoping we’d evolve into a resolution, and I’ve had my time being uncomfortable and begging to talk about something else. Screw all that. What’s going on is wrong, and it’s evil, and it’s time for the people who have had their eyes closed to wake up and realize that we are standing around and watching a true horror unfold.

Matt Walsh had a terrific Facebook post on this subject, and what that fourth CMP video brought to the table. An excerpt…

Look, if you are still on Planned Parenthood’s side, there is no debating anymore. You have chosen to ignore or deny the indisputable reality of the situation. I want to make it clear that I do blame you for this, and I hold you complicit. Enough of deflecting the blame to institutions and government bodies and so forth. Sure, the abortion industry and the government deserve all the blame in the world, but I’m tired of people letting the average pro-choice Planned Parenthood sympathizer off the hook.

You people are adults. You have brains, unlike the babies whose brains are sucked out and sold for profit. You have souls. You have the ability to understand simple moral concepts. Now put those capacities to work. Wake up. No more excuses. This is a moment in history where either you are right or you are wrong, and it is just not OK to be wrong about this. It’s not OK.

And you are definitely wrong. One hundred percent. Black and white. Absolute. You’re not even a little bit right. There isn’t even a glimmer of rightness in your position. You are totally and indefensibly wrong, and you should be profoundly ashamed of yourself. I love you and I pray for you, but I am very angry at you. You are whistling past the concentration camp, pretending you can’t smell the burning flesh, and I, for one, am done letting you off the hook for it. Get it together, alright?

That, certainly. But I go further, because it’s simply not acceptable for the people aligned with Planned Parenthood to call anyone names anymore. You’re the bad guys, and you can’t deny it. It’s on that film, it’s in the numbers, it’s in your history and it’s written in your hearts. What you’re doing, what you’re supporting, is wrong. And it’s time for it to stop. I’m in this fight now and I’ll be making demands until we see a change.