Americans United for Life Action president Charmaine Yoest is both relieved and excited about Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential pick. Yoest spoke with me about the difference between last week and this week.
“Last week, you saw the conservative base of the Republican Party really demoralized and discouraged when they were hearing all the talk about putting in a pro-abortion vice presidential pick. Now with such a solid platform coming out of the deliberations last week and a solid pro-life ticket, everybody’s really excited.
People have been talking about the broadening of the evangelical agenda. Do you think that’s happening?
As the leader of a pro-life organization, I find it really troubling when people try to juxtapose a pro-life agenda with other issues, like poverty, and saying there’s some sort of zero-sum gain, that if you concentrate on life issues that doesn’t mean you don’t care about other issues as much.
Last week, Democrats were trying to emphasizing the idea of reducing the number of abortions. What did you think about their platform?
They included language about welcoming and supporting motherhood, and we were troubled by the moral equivalency that the Democratic platform was trying to make, that all choices are equal. I find that to be disingenuous and a pretty egregious case of political spin.
Do you think Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy will cause some people to re-think her candidacy?
There may be some people who react that way. What I’m hearing from people is that she’s a human being, this happens in an awful lot of families. The real question is, how do you respond when it comes along? Let’s face it, we’ve all made bad choices. Some of us have to bear more public consequences for them than others.”
