Anti-choice activists swarmed Washington yesterday to protest on the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision and conservatives naturally used this opportunity to wax apoplectic about the constitutionally-protected reproductive right.

In his “closing argument” yesterday on Fox Business’ Freedom Watch, host Andrew Napolitano lambasted the Supreme Court for deciding that a fetus is “not a person” and that the right to privacy protects a woman’s decision. Equating the ruling to the high court’s Dred Scott decision “in which it ruled that blacks were not persons,” Napolitano later declared the it’s reasoning to be “the philosophical argument underlying the Holocaust“:

NAPOLITANO: How scary is this? The Supreme Court declares a class of humanity not to be persons, and then permits people to destroy members of that class. That’s what happened to blacks during slavery. That was the philosophical argument underlying the Holocaust. That’s what’s happening to babies in the womb, even as I speak. And that might become the basis for the government killing persons it hates or fears in the future.

Watch it:

Napolitano’s outlandish and unrelenting hyperbole was, unfortunately, not an outlier, but more the general tone of Republican remarks this week. Here are four GOP lawmakers who felt inclined to make ridiculous comparisons to belittle a woman’s right to choose:

– Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ): Smith urged a room of anti-abortion activists at the Family Research Council to “unite” under one Republican presidential candidate because “Obama is the enemy of life, as is his people.”

– Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX): Speaking at the March for Life rally on Capitol Hill, Gohmert blasted pro-choice advocates for opposing further restrictions on abortion and somehow managed to equate it with the national debt. “My dear friends for life, the same selfish arrogance and reckless disregard that would allow lives to be taken and one generation to take life after life after life from a future generation will also allow a generation to forge chains made of mountains of debt to set on those they do allow to be born,” he said.

– Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): While no longer in the running, Bachmann said in her first public appearance since dropping out that this year’s presidential elections will end all abortions, ever. “Next year we will gather in a day of celebration when we have finally ended abortion in this all important election,” she foretold.

– Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH): Also speaking at the March for Life event, Jordan insisted that the “vast majority of Americans share the values” of the anti-choice activists. After all, “Our Founders articulated their vision for a pro-life America” and thus it’s only natural that they would detest a decision made hundreds of years later to protect a right derived from the very constitution that they wrote.

But conservatives are offering more than words. Just one month into the new year, House Republicans have already introduced three new anti-choice bills to severely restrict abortion rights. One requires doctors to perform an abortion no less than 24 hours after they receive written certification from a woman seeking an abortion; another prevents women in Washington, DC from seeking abortion after 20 weeks; and the last requires women to view an ultrasound of the fetus before they can go through with the abortion procedure.

Politico Pulse pulls out this telling internal memo from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece this morning examining the thinking of the Obama administration during the health care reform debate. Obama publicly flirted with the idea of making a greater investment in tort reform and pursued the proposals in order to secure Republican cooperation and support:

“On July 1, 2009, his top health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, submitted a detailed nine-page policy memo asking whether the White House should consider including medical-malpractice reform in the legislation. Most Democrats opposed the idea, but the American Medical Association was pushing for it. ‘Obviously, we shouldn’t do anything that weighs down the overall effort,’ Obama wrote back, in his characteristically cautious and reasonable style, ‘but if this helps the AMA stay on board, we should explore it.”

Ultimately, none of this mattered very much. The Affordable Care Act contains funding for tort reform demonstration projects — as well as a multitude of other Republican-backed initiatives — that the GOP ignored because they were more interested in preventing Obama from signing one of the most sweeping social reforms in a generation than addressing the nation’s health care crisis.

What the administration learned all to late is that the details of the policy had absolutely no bearing on the tone of the opposition. Republicans relied on the same “big government” talking points to combat reform even as the measure became more conservative and Democratic lawmakers stripped out initiatives like the public option, end-of-life counseling and a host of other provisions that Republicans found repugnant. But no matter how much the bill changed to resemble the Heritage-backed Romneycare solution that relied on private competition and private enterprise, the GOP still claimed that the government was taking over health care and rationing services to seniors.

Lizza reports that Obama still believed that he could win over the opposition and rejected good policy in order to make the bill more acceptable to conservative opinion makers. One memo reveals, for instance, that Obama turned down a pilot program “to study the most effective treatments for patients” within the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP) because it was not “politically viable” and could prove a target for Fox News. The president wrote at the end of the memo, almost apologetically, “Unfortunately I think the political guys are right about how it would be characterized. Let’s go back at it in future years, when the temperature on health care and the economy has gone down.”

Almost two years later, the temperature is still at a boiling point and the GOP presidential candidates are crisscrossing the country accusing Obama and the law of everything from ending private enterprise to jeopardizing the livelihood of seniors. Given the partisan divide of modern American politics, Republicans and their supporters in the media will invent controversy where none exists and so it’s foolhardy to abandon good policy out of fear of inflaming the critics. They’ll burn you anyway, while you’ll have a harder time defending a decision that was made on political, rather than policy merits.