A skilled surgeon needs a scalpel, but killers can get by with cudgels. That is because it’s a whole lot easier to smash a skull than to separate conjoined twins. America’s abortion status quo is corrupt and callous, a regime of highly organized crime which lets abortionists legally kill an unborn child through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason, and be massively subsidized by the government to do it. Taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood clinics are strategically planted in poor, non-white neighborhoods across the country, still serving Margaret Sanger’s racist mission of getting “more children from the fit, fewer from the unfit.” More than a million American children have been destroyed each year, every year since 1973. And now we know that Planned Parenthood is selling those dead children to labs to boost its “revenue streams.”

The pro-choice movement defends this annual human sacrifice with blunt, heavy-handed weapons, which it uses to keep control. But those weapons are losing their force, as the prime-time Republican debate resoundingly proves. In fact, the only clear winner of that debate was the pro-life movement.

Abortion’s best defenses are ignorance and apathy. When pro-lifers succeed in getting out truthful information that makes people care — like the videos captured by the Center for Medical Progress — the Abortion Syndicate sends out enforcers with lead-weighted truncheons in the form of gag orders, distortions and lies.

The biggest, heaviest lie that these thugs like to swing around is the charge of “extremism.” Most normal people don’t want to think of themselves as isolated zealots. So if someone is speaking a highly inconvenient truth, the best way to squelch it is not to engage his arguments, but to claim that he’s out there alone, then rouse all the sheep to try to drown him out, ala Animal Farm: “Pro-choice good, pro-life b-a-a-a-a-a-d!”

In the primetime Republican debate, Megyn Kelly of FoxNews tried out this sheep bomb on more than one candidate. She went hardest after America’s most effective pro-life governor, Scott Walker of Wisconsin. In the same style she used to confront Donald Trump for his piggish remarks about women, Kelly confronted Walker with his support for a no-exceptions law protecting all unborn life.

She cited a study suggesting that Walker was out of sync with 83% of Americans. Kelly clearly expected him to backpedal, cave, or flinch, but she must have forgotten who Walker is: The governor who month after month faced down the angry mobs recruited by greedy public employee unions. Walker didn’t blink, but calmly reiterated his support for a blanket protection of every unborn child in America. Then he noted that he had defunded Planned Parenthood four years ago, long before its appalling human organ trafficking business was even exposed, and called out Hillary Clinton as the real extremist for standing behind that violent organization. Walker’s answer was a real profile in courage — and a tribute to the strength and dedication of America’s pro-life movement.

Kelly then turned her fire on Marco Rubio, trying to claw out a “gotcha” moment by quoting New York’s Cardinal Dolan, who criticized pro-life politicians that will not protect unborn children conceived in the course of rape or incest. She assumed that Rubio embraced those broad and easily-abused exceptions, and demanded to know how he would answer the cardinal’s attack. Rubio looked puzzled, and quickly corrected Kelly: He had never endorsed abandoning those unborn children either, and wondered where she had gotten that false impression. He went on later to speak of how future generations will look back on us as “barbarians” for “murdering millions of babies.”

The truth about abortion was running free all through the debate, and the Abortion Syndicate’s soldiers were surely shaking in their jackboots. Ted Cruz was characteristically eloquent and forthright in unfolding his pro-life record. Jeb Bush cited his own consistent pro-life lawmaking, but another questioner pressed him hard for having sat on the board of the Bloomberg Foundation that funded Planned Parenthood. He defended himself, in part, by pointing to Florida funding he had provided to pro-life pregnancy centers. I hope that the hard-working, unpaid volunteers who man (but mostly woman) these front-line emergency wards for mothers with crisis pregnancies take heart from this: A leading candidate running for president wants to wrap himself in your flag. Pause for a moment. Be proud of yourselves.

Mike Huckabee was bold enough to speak of using the 5^th and 14^th Amendments to correct the ignorant decision of Roe v. Wade, which science has rendered hopelessly outdated. The latest technology has shown us clearly and unmistakably the humanity of the unborn, and the law must catch up with the verdict of modern medicine.

No one asked Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, or John Kasich about abortion, but their pro-life positions are not in doubt. In fact, here at the top-card debate of the leading presidential candidates for the Republican nomination, not a single candidate was willing to call himself pro-choice. At the afternoon debate with the darker-horse contenders, only one Republican, the almost forgotten George Pataki, fessed up to that position — and really, what has he got to lose?

Even Donald Trump had to claim that he had a pro-life conversion. No it wasn’t convincing, but he felt constrained to say it — this man who is blunt enough to violate nearly every tenet of political correctness and even common courtesy. He had to say it.

At this debate, foreign aid to Israel, of all things, was up for dispute between Chris Christie and Rand Paul. But abortion wasn’t. No Republican was willing to embrace the extremist position that favors our current status quo of a million dead babies each year. That tells us something: The hearts and minds of Americans are changing. The truth is out. The thugs are on the run.