"How can the next generation defend abortion rights when they don't think abortion rights need defending?" What a quandry! The Newsweek article goes on:
"When the history of the 21st century is written, March 21, 2010, will go down as the day Congress cleared the way for health-care reform. Yet for those in the abortion-rights community, March 21 will mark a completely different turning point: the day when they became acutely aware of their waning influence in Washington. . . . So if Democrats won't stand strong for abortion rights, who will? . . .
"This past January, when [NARAL president] Keenan's train pulled into Washington's Union Station, a few blocks from the Capitol, she was greeted by a swarm of anti-abortion-rights activists. . . . 'I just thought, my gosh, they are so young. There are so many of them, and they are so young.' . . .
"New NARAL research, conducted earlier this year and released exclusively to NEWSWEEK, only amplified Keenan's fears. A survey of 700 young Americans showed there was a stark "intensity gap" on abortion. . . . Worse still for NARAL, the millennials surveyed didn't view abortion as an imperiled right in need of defenders. As one young mother in a focus group told NARAL, it seemed to her that abortion was easily accessible. How did she know? The parking lot at her local clinic, she told them, was always full.
"Millennials are more likely than their boomer parents to see abortion as a moral issue. In the NARAL focus groups, young voters flat-out disapproved of a woman's abortion, called her actions immoral, yet maintained that the government had absolutely no right to intervene. As one young woman in Denver said, 'I only get mad when [a friend] tries telling me, "It is like nothing, oh well, it is just an abortion."?' It wasn't the abortion itself that seemed to trouble the woman; rather, it was her friend's nonchalance. 'Even if it was like nothing,' the woman told NARAL, 'it was something.'"
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