THERE IS A SPECIAL PLACE: Charmaine Yoest’s Cheerful War on Abortion
New York Times, Nov 2012:
None of this, however, means that Charmaine Yoest is a moderate. For all her emphasis on women’s health, her end goal isn’t to make abortion safer. She wants to make the procedure illegal. She leaves no room for exceptions in the case of rape or incest or to preserve the health of the mother. She believes that embryos have legal rights and opposes birth control, like the IUD, that she thinks “has life-ending properties.”
Nor does Yoest advocate for reducing abortion by increasing access to birth control. When I asked what she thought about a study, published in October, which found a 60 to 80 percent drop in the abortion rate, compared with the national average, among women in St. Louis who received free birth control for three years, she said, “I don’t want to frustrate you, but I’m not going to go there.” She referred me to a critique of the study’s methodology in National Review. “It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up by conflating abortion and birth control,” she said when pressed on PBS last year. “Because that would be, frankly, carrying water for the other side to allow them to redefine the issue in that way.”
Yoest doesn’t like to speak this bluntly — she was taken aback when I reminded her of the PBS quote. And she is careful to avoid missteps like the Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin’s comment in August that victims of “legitimate rape” don’t need access to abortion because they don’t become pregnant, or the claim at the end of October by Richard Mourdock, the Indiana Senate candidate, that when women do become pregnant from rape, “that is something God intended to happen.”