Smarting from defeats in state legislatures across the nation and seeing the public support for infanticide slipping, Planned Parenthood has come up with a great idea. They will send door-to-door canvassers to convince people that abortion is a good thing. What makes this canvass different from any previous efforts is that the canvassers will be women who have had abortions.

The operation is being headed by homosexual activist and political strategist David Fleischer:

Eventually, Fleischer knew, they would have to organize their way back to the California ballot with an initiative to reinstate same-sex marriages. “People were really scared and dispirited and didn’t know what to do as a practical matter, other than vent their outrage. And there’s only so far that’s going to take you,” he recalls. Fleischer decided he would move to California and, under the auspices of the Center’s new Leadership Lab, develop a training program to develop gay political talent. While exhuming the dismal history of Proposition 8 to understand his side’s failures, Fleischer arrived at a tactical insight that in retrospect was a revelation. “Let’s go talk to the people who voted against us and ask why,” he recalls thinking. “In a way I feel like a schmuck that it took me over 40 years of canvassing before it occurred to me to do that.”

Fleischer and his team at Vote For Equality, as the Center’s campaign was known, identified precincts in the Los Angeles suburbs where Prop 8 had done particularly well and sent volunteers to knock on the doors of regular voters there. The first script Fleischer drafted, in January 2009, pivoted around one question, and a follow-up: “How do you feel about marriage for gay and lesbian couples?” Then: “Can I ask you why you feel that way?”At that point, a stage direction advised canvassers: “Optional: Insert Brief Personal Statement.” Many of the volunteers were gay or lesbian, and Fleischer realized that meant inviting them to effectively out themselves to someone they had just met, and who was being approached only because the two were likely to have clashing notions of civil rights.

Now the thinks he can duplicate the same effect and change opinion on abortion:

[Organizer Virginia Millacci] said that with a sense of moral conviction, but it also amounted to a hypothesis. All of the names on the walk sheets were part of a sample of 14,128 southern Californians who had been selected for an experiment. By the time the day was over, the researchers who had designed the study believed, as many 500 people would have their views on abortion irreparably changed by having a woman arrive unannounced on their doorstep and reveal, with little wind-up or context, that she had had an abortion.

Obviously, it will be very difficult to find enough women who are enthusiastic about having whacked an offspring so some, or as I suspect most, of the volunteers will not have had abortions. The image of a training session for canvassers shows there are a handful of Pajama-Boy-metrosexual-sensitive-gay-man types in the crowd, it is more than a little unclear to me how a guy who has zero chance of getting laid is going to be convincing about abortion. The article is ambiguous but it give s the impression that both abortion veterans and abortion wannabes will use a script that portrays them as having had abortions (the women, that is, not the male hangers on), but it would not be surprising given the natural dishonesty of the pro-abort movement:

(Each canvasser was assigned a unique identification number, so the disparate impact of those who had had abortions and those who hadn’t could be measured anonymously.)  

If you want to know just how screwed up the people are who are participating in this, savor this vignette:

Gizella Czene didn’t flinch. She had been on similar canvasses in that neighborhood years for years, accompanying her son. He was then 12, knocking on doors and telling the people who lived behind them that he was gay as he probed their views on same-sex marriage. “He developed the confidence to do it,” Czene said proudly. He is now at college, but she once again drove an hour each way from Van Nuys on a Saturday morning. This time, she would not be talking about her gay son but about her own experiences with abortion. “It’s easier to talk to strangers,” she said, “because you don’t care what they really think.”

It is hard to see how this street theater gets much traction. Abortion is markedly different than homosexuality. Having sympathy for someone based on their psychological problems is a lot different that having sympathy for them based on bad personal choices. I suspect this will be yet another “own goal” of the type the pro-aborts have become famous for.