Dems Speak Honestly About Abortion
I shall be long grateful to Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran for her part in exposing “the unfruitful works of darkness” that is abortion.
For decades we have been told a lie about abortion. We were told that those who supported it were not actually in favor of killing babies -- no one would ever support such a horrid thing, of course -- instead, they merely supported the right of women to remove an unwanted mass of tissue from their bodies. Rather than killing an unborn child, they say, think of it as “a crappy dentist appointment or something.”
Politifact, a supposedly nonpartisan “fact-checking website,” even labeled the comments of a Texas state representative that abortion “kills as many as 1,000 black children every day” as “mostly false,” largely because of his “characterization of abortions as killing babies is disputed.”
However, most of those who put forth this argument were lying the entire time.
How can they pretend to believe that the baby isn’t a baby when they are introducing “legislation [that] would allow a woman to receive an abortion even while she was going into labor”?
Are we to believe that even when a mother is dilating and the baby is crowning in the vaginal opening that the child still isn’t a living being?
It was a lie all along, and not one held by all of those in favor of abortion. For example, Barack Obama, as an Illinois state senator, opposed a bill that would have essentially criminalized the killing of children who have been delivered and who are living independently of their mother’s body.
As originally proposed, the 2003 state bill, SB 1082, sought to define the term ‘born-alive infant’ as any infant, even one born as the result of an unsuccessful abortion, that shows vital signs separate from its mother. The bill would have established that infants thus defined were humans with legal rights. It never made it to the floor; it was voted down by the Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired.
Barack Obama was able to successfully lie about his opposition to protections for born alive children. However, few can lie as frequently and as successfully as the future 44th President.
Some even see no need to lie. Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams is such a person. In her infamous essay “So what if abortion ends life?” she admits that life begins at conception and that abortion is the taking of that life, but those admissions do not matter to her:
When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late-term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there's a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you're born? Only when you're viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?
Yet most on the left are as hesitant (albeit increasingly less so) to admit they favor infanticide as they are to admit that they favor open borders or socialism.
Take Governor Northam of Virginia remarkably callus recent remarks. As described by ABC News:
The Democratic governor and pediatric neurologist was defending efforts to loosen abortion restrictions during a radio interview on WTOP-FM Wednesday when described a hypothetical situation where a severely deformed newborn infant could be left to die.
Northam said that if a woman were to desire an abortion as she's going into labor, the baby would be "resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue" between doctors and the mother.
Yet the next day Governor Northam claimed, incredibly, that “Republicans were mischaracterizing his statement for political gain.”
Perhaps it is science that is forcing abortion supporters to increasingly abandon the premise that abortion is not the killing of an unborn child. It becomes harder to dismiss the notion that life exists inside of a pregnant womb as the fantasy of a bunch of MAGA-hat wearing Bible-clingers who prefer watching football to MSNBC.
According to Emma Green of The Atlantic:
New technology makes it easier to apprehend the humanity of a growing child and imagine a fetus as a creature with moral status. Over the last several decades, pro-life leaders have increasingly recognized this and rallied the power of scientific evidence to promote their cause.
They have built new institutions to produce, track, and distribute scientifically crafted information on abortion. They hungrily follow new research in embryology. They celebrate progress in neonatology as a means to save young lives.
New science is “instilling a sense of awe that we never really had before at any point in human history,” [pro-life activist Ashley] McGuire said. “We didn’t know any of this.”
However, regardless of the reason, it is important to be grateful to Ms. Tran for introducing legislation that would, by her own admission, allow abortion to occur even as the woman is in labor, even as she almost simultaneously introduced a bill to protect the “fall cankerworm."
It is important because many of the proponents of abortion -- even of what I call “fourth-trimester abortions” -- tend to be the same who want to be part of the federal government as it grabs control of our healthcare.
Not all of us will ever be pregnant, but we are all getting older. Many of us are or will become senior citizens, requiring a great deal of healthcare. We must ask ourselves: how comfortable should we be in allowing those who would defend cankerworms, but call for allowing the killing of a child -- even as this child is emerging from the birth canal -- to care for us?
--DK