My guess is 50 showed at Ascension’s pro-life talk tonight, by Ill. Right to Life exec director Bill Beckman.  He’s a true wonk and delivered a lot of solid stuff, but I bailed out after an hour-fifteen or so: Ask him the time and he tells you how to make a watch, a la Ronald Reagan, per his son a long time ago.

Some arresting stuff:

* Sen. Durbin “lies” when he keeps saying abortion is not mentioned in the now probably moribund health care legislation: doesn’t have to be named.  point is, it’s not excluded.  It wasn’t in Medicaid legislation in the mid-70s when the late Henry Hyde wrote his amendment that forbade federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients.  Deceitful of Durbin, says Beckman.  I agree.

* National inconsistency bordering on schizophrenia (my designation) lies in how inheritance and murder laws in many if not most states (I forget) that say the child in the womb has rights — kill a pregnant woman and you do double homicide.

* Early feminists (suffragists) were pro-life.  Only in the early ‘60s did feminism become identical with pro-abortionism.  I remember asking a feminist in a 1970s press conference if feminists were all pro-abortion, and the woman said yes, looking at me as if I were not quite with it.

* It was a lie foisted on us by pro-aborts that five to ten thou women a year were dying of illegal, botched abortions: 39 died that way in the U.S. in one year under consideration at the time.

* Nothing surprising here: pro-life Dems don’t get anywhere.  They can’t advance.  Remember Gov. Casey of PA, who couldn’t get a spot at the podium at the 1992 Dem convention?

On the other hand, five of six current Republican gubernatorial candidates for Illinois are pro-life, most of the senatorial hopefuls, all of the lt. gov. candidates.  As I say, we know which is the abortion party.

* Illinois is the only state w/o a parental-involvement law, requiring notification or consent for a minor’s abortion.  It got one in 1995, but the Ill. supremes wouldn’t write the rules for the “judicial bypass” it required — an escape clause whereby the abortion-seeker could plead her case for non-notification to a judge.

In 2006 the Illinois supremes wrote rules and sent AG Lisa Madigan (D.-Mike), who so badly presented the Illinois case to the federal judge that he said come back when you know what you have or don’t have.

Last year the Illinois supremes, all seven of them, wrote Lisa M. ordering her to go back and do it right.  She did, and for a few hours last year, the bill was in force.  Enter ACLU with some sleight of hand and the original injunction was restored.

Beckman estimates 5,000 abortions a year on non-Illinoisans drawn by its lack of a parental law — too much business for relevant docs et al. to go easily into the dark night, as they see it, of pro-life-ism.