April 05--Donald Trump didn't get the memo.
Or if he did get the memo, he didn't read it.
Or if he did get and read the memo, he ignored it the way he has ignored most conventional political advice.
In any case ...
The memo to which I refer is the confidential talking-points briefing from organized opponents of abortion rights on how to deal with the difficult question: "If abortion is tantamount to murder, then shouldn't a woman who obtains an abortion be prosecuted as an accessory to murder?"
Trump, the Republican presidential hopeful, famously stammered his way though an answer to a version of this question last week during a town hall interview, concluding that "there has to be some form of punishment" for the woman.
Obviously. But the memo emphatically forbids such an answer. Or so I'm guessing. I've never actually seen it and for all I know it may not even exist on paper, but here's how it might read:
The "gotcha" element among pro-abortionists will, from time to time, try to make us confront the implication of our bedrock principle that fetal life is morally equivalent to any other human life. In that light, they will say, a woman who arranges with her doctor to terminate that life is no different from any other accomplice in a murder-for-hire scheme.
They will conjure up scenarios in which, if we manage to outlaw abortion, otherwise law-abiding girls and women who decide not to continue their pregnancies will be packed off to prison right along with those who perform their abortions as well as those who've beaten their children to death.
Deflect at all costs! The idea is so politically toxic in today's social landscape that it repels many of those in the middle of this debate whose discomfort with the idea of abortion makes them potential allies.
Answer that you consider women to be secondary victims, not perpetrators of abortion. Their condition has left them weak-minded, pitiable, desperate and incompetent to the point of temporary insanity.
