National Right To Life Committee Another Corporate Interests Front Group

Desiring of seeing whether the NRTLC cares about life outside of abortion I perused their website.

Basically their two main concerns are abortion and euthanasia, although there was an entry for Medicare, which I opened eagerly, hoping to see something about prescription drugs perhaps, or something about making sure that seniors are ensured proper access to providers or are not overcharged when the provider fees are considerably greater than the Medicare allowance. Nah.

All the NRTLC cares about with Medicare is making sure there are no "price controls" and no "rationing" in Medicare. In case you don't know, "price controls" and "rationing" are industry propaganda buzz-words used to fear monger the public into protecting the industry's profits.

An additional item of interest on the NRTLC webpage is a rebuttal to a study that showed abortions declining in the 1990's but increasing since W took office. The NRTLC didn't like the implication of this. And the NRTLC authors have a point. The decline in abortions was greatest from 1990-1995 and the original Stassen article was incorrect about two of the states he had claimed saw increases since 2000, meaning that of the 16 states he gathered information for, eight saw increases and eight either remained the same or declined in abortion incidence. So the relation between politics and abortion is more muddled than the original Stassen piece would make it seem. Fair enough. But the rebuttal piece is pretty snarky, considering that the linkage between the political balance of power and abortion incidence is murky at best. Why get all huffy about this? If I was affiliated with the NRTLC or a similar organization I might be concerned about any demonstrated lack of connection between the election of supposedly anti-abortion politicians and the incidence of abortion. Or I would be if my interest was in seeing the number of abortions reduced. However, if all I was interested in was overturning the abortion rights law or propping up the Republican Party, then I might be eager to rebut any claim that the number of abortions wasn't effected by the election of anti-abortion candidates.

So despite it's label, the NRTLC isn't concerned about life as much as it is in supporting the Republican Party and conservative reactionary politics. As such it joins a long list of such dubious entries as Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council in presenting itself as a lamb but whose politics is that of a dragon.*

*a reference to Revelation 13.