(Photo: Carolyn Kaster, AP)
 

Earlier this month on Meet the Press, presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton committed the ultimate political gaffe: She blurted out the truth. When the topic of abortion came up, Clinton accidentally called an unborn baby a person. But unlike many political gaffes, hers got worse with context. She said, “The unborn person doesn't have constitutional rights.”

It's a news media moment a bit reminiscent of the recent Doritos Super Bowl kerfuffle, in which an ad showed a couple looking at a sonogram screen and the fetus reaching out for the chips. NARAL (formerly known as the National Abortion Rights Action League) and friends slammed the ad for “humanizing fetuses.” Pro-choicers attacked Clinton for the same crime: stating the obvious.

Diana Arellano, community engagement manager for Planned Parenthood of Illinois, tweeted that Clinton’s remark “further stigmatizes” abortion by calling a “fetus an ‘unborn child.’ ”

I’ll say. But the pro-life side is maybe a bit quieter than you might expect. Clinton has actually helped our cause, not just by “humanizing the fetus” but also by accidentally revealing what has, for years, been harder to avoid, thanks to incredible advances in science and ultrasound technology that prove the unborn child is just that.

And yet Clinton has done nothing but lean hard to the left on the issue as the public grows more uncertain about how to square abortion with the reality that science lets us see babies yawning, clapping, dancing, responding to a mother’s voice and, in one viral instance, even giving a thumb’s up, long before they are born.

Clinton staunchly opposes a federal bill that would bar abortions after 20 weeks, at which point the procedure is so gruesome as to have been outlawed with some exceptions in all but six countries in the world. She calls the proposal part of a “dangerous trend.” As a senator, she voted in favor of keeping partial-birth abortions legal, against parental notification for minors who receive out-of-state abortions, and perhaps most alarming, against criminalizing harm to a baby during a violent crime against the mother.

Remember the Craigslist killer Dynel Lane, who lured a woman seven months pregnant to her home in Colorado to buy used baby clothes, attacked her with a knife and cut out her baby? Not a double crime in Clinton's eyes. And not in the eyes of Planned Parenthood either, which worked hard against a proposed bill in Colorado in the wake of that horrific story to criminalize such violence against women and their unborn babies. Thanks in part to stellar lobbying, Lane was not charged in the death of the baby, which Lane’s husband reportedly found gasping in a bathtub.

Clinton’s laundry list of abortion extremism includes her stated desire to repeal the Hyde Amendment, a popular provision that bars the use of taxpayer funding for abortion; a 100% approval rating from NARAL; and the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood, to whom she has pledged her unwavering support. The group has responded with a rare primary endorsement and a seven-figure ad buy, indirectly subsidized by the half a billion dollars in taxpayer money it receives annually.

Clinton has not even expressed support for religious liberty when it intersects with the issue of abortion, having stated instead that “far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care” and that when it comes to abortion, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

I suppose first science has to change, because our beliefs are rooted in the medical reality that the unborn are members of the human family, a vulnerable class of people waiting for their turn to be recognized as meriting rights under the Constitution by their very humanity.

Clinton can't walk back calling the unborn a "person." It is a simple statement of the truth.