In an increasingly post-truth, post-moral, post-Christian culture, it appears that many consciences are not just seared, they are fully charred. Partying over late-term abortion and pushing the envelope on infanticide are sure signs that we are not only losing our religion but we are also losing our humanity, as we callously continue operating as a culture of death, soullessly seeking to expand our killing opportunities.
Did it turn your stomach recently to see New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and legislators jubilantly cheering, as if the New York Giants had just won the Super Bowl? What were they so vigorously celebrating on the very anniversary of Roe v. Wade? Simply put, they were celebrating the expansion of the legal right to kill babies—not just through the first and second trimester, but all the way up until their birthday—no doctor required. Cuomo, who claims to be Roman Catholic, boasted that the new law is “the most aggressive women’s equality platform in the nation.”
Do you remember the comparatively whimsical “good old days” of yesteryear when abortion advocates claimed they wanted the practice of in utero baby killing to be “safe, rare, and legal”? For radical leftist those times are long gone. New York, Virginia, New Mexico, the U.S. Senate. Over the past few weeks, leftist legislators appear to be tripping over themselves, racing towards the dark goal of making the right to kill babies even more extreme—including still in the womb, up until their birthday, and, in some shocking cases, even after birth.
New York’s new law allows in utero baby-killing up to twenty-four weeks (6 months) or later (translation: up until the baby’s birthday) if “necessary to protect a patient’s life or health.” Twenty-four weeks is when most babies are able to survive outside the womb with modern medical technology. However, a woman’s “health” is, reliably, an extremely vague exception, large enough to drive a proverbial truckload of discarded baby body parts through. This is because “health” includes mental health, which can include claims of stress or other more casual emotional states. Late term abortions are not as rare as one would hope. In fact, it is estimated that more than 12,000 abortions per year in the U.S. are late term. Thus, New York’s law effectively allows abortions up to the baby’s birthdate (i.e. 40 weeks or 9 months).
Virginia’s cutting-edge bill would also permit baby killing up until birth (i.e., the third trimester/40 weeks) if a doctor agreed it was necessary, as was admitted in committee by a state legislator. Governor Ralph Northam added to the controversy when his comments during a radio interview, discussing a hypothetical situation where a baby slated for abortion is born alive, were viewed by some to be an endorsement of infanticide.
New Mexico’s proposal, House Bill 51, which is currently working its way through the legislature, is perhaps even more radical. It would allow in utero baby-killing on demand for any reason, knocking out any parental notification for minors and disallowing any conscience protections for doctors and nurses, whether motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs or personal revulsion to killing kids.
Many states inconsistently protect pre-born life. Widespread state standards for criminal prosecution define the killing of a pregnant woman and her unborn baby as a double homicide, highlighting the erratic thinking and ethics of the left about babies and their personhood status. In most states, the baby is essentially considered a person if violently killed by a third party by gunshot, fist, or blunt force trauma. But the baby is merely a fetus/non-person when the decision to kill is made by a mommy, simply because she doesn’t want to be one. Perhaps recognizing this glaring inconsistency, New York’s radical sweeping law removed recognition of the pre-born from the criminal code when it comes to homicide, even if the child is wanted. And, as a result, a man who murdered a woman and her developing child was charged with only one killing.
Earlier this week, infanticide was more clearly on the table in the U.S. Senate. Liberal Senators, perhaps in a deadly rush to one-up baby-killing state legislators, even more brazenly affirmed their infanticidal tendencies by blocking a law—the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. This ethical bill would have required doctors to provide lifesaving medical attention to a baby born alive after an unsuccessful abortion. All but three Democratic Senators voted against the bill, including all of those seeking the nomination for president. This outrageous vote is a very bad omen for babies who survive botched abortions and make it out of the womb alive—only to be left bleeding on a cold table to die, or worse, be killed by the doctor in the hospital.
“I want to ask each and every one of my colleagues whether or not we’re okay with infanticide,” Sasse said on the Senate floor Monday. Yes, Senator Sasse, they clearly are. Planned Parenthood and their far-left lemmings clearly view any limits, no matter how sane or reasonable, as an attack on their “sacred” abortion rights. The bill was simply a recognition of the dignity and respect that should be afforded to those babies who survive attempted butchering in the womb. Democrats, eyes wide open, voted no. Tragically, radical leftists are so committed to abortion-on-demand that they are unwilling to stop infanticide-on-demand.
Abortion activists appear to be motivated by a raging primal fear that Roe v. Wade will be overturned by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, emboldened by recent liberal mid-term electoral dominance. As Governor Cuomo stated, “With the signing of this bill, we are sending a clear message that whatever happens in Washington, women in New York will always have the fundamental right to control their own body.” But what about the aborted female babies who would grow up to be women? What about their women’s rights? Clearly, abortion zealots want to establish unrestrained abortion-on-demand as a human right, one that can eclipse even the more well-established Constitutional rights, including religious liberty and Free Speech, as protected by the First Amendment. But in reality, abortion is an inhuman right that refuses to acknowledge the inherent value, dignity, humanity, and, yes, personhood of developing babies, made, as President Trump recently acknowledged, in the “holy image of God.”
Thomas Jefferson and our founders clearly believed that we are created in the image of God and possess the God-given unalienable right to life:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
—Declaration of Independence, 1776.
Indeed, the right to life, as recognized in the Declaration of Independence, is the most basic of human rights. In fact, the predicate of being alive creates the conditions that make the enjoyment of all other inalienable rights possible. The role of legitimate government is to secure our rights, including life, not to destroy them. And, while each death of each child is a tragedy and a violation of our human dignity, thankfully twenty states have passed laws that restrict abortion after 18-20 weeks. New York joins only seven countries, including China and North Korea, that allow wholesale abortions after twenty weeks. However, this is certainly nothing to cheer about or be proud of, as these nations have some of the worst human rights records on the planet. Indeed, Americans should be leading the way on human rights, but New York is pulling us over a moral cliff.
Certainly part of the problem is our popular terminology of death. For example, we call baby-killing “abortion.” The word abortion itself has become a euphemism, dulling the harsh and bloody reality of what is actually occurring. It insulates us from the callous, brutal, and fundamental unhuman act that is killing babies in the womb, many of whom could survive on the outside—if we would just let them. Similarly, couching abortion only in terms of a “woman’s rights,” as Governor Cuomo does, or calling it the “termination of pregnancy,” as opposed to the deliberate killing of a person—a human being—are rhetorical tricks that seek to dull our moral conscience and placate our natural ethical outrage. What needs to die is the death of outrage and the confusion such euphemisms foster, not one more child.
Yet our confused and foggy zeitgeist immorally instructs us that a “fetus” (a developing baby) may be legally killed if two conditions are met: 1) the baby is hidden in the womb and 2) the mother, for whatever reason, does not want the baby. But quite honestly there is no real moral difference, and there should be no legal difference, between killing a 40-week baby in the womb or a toddler outside of the womb. Both are taking the life of an innocent and helpless, vulnerable person. Both are, or at least should be, infanticide. As Senator Ben Sasse recently pointed out, “In just a few years pro-abortion zealots went from ‘safe, legal, and rare’ to ‘keep the newborns comfortable while the doctor debates infanticide.’”
Recently taken to callously “shout” their abortions, they appear to now be willing to also, horrifically, shout their infanticides. These are the same leftist elite activists that are often so very preachy when it comes to making broad “moral” pronouncements about who is and who is not on the “right” or “wrong” side of history. I submit that the prideful politicians in New York, Virginia, New Mexico, and the U.S. Senate, who are expanding the scope of how and when we kill babies, are clearly on the wrong side of history. They will face the fierce hand of justice for what they have done. This is because it is they who are on the wrong side of God, who creates, as the pinnacle of creation, unique and infinitely valuable, precious babies in his holy image, male and female, and who is the final judge of what is truly good and what is truly evil.
— by Dean R. Broyles, Esq.
Broyles is a constitutional attorney serving as the President of The National Center For Law & Policy (NCLP), an organization fighting to promote and defend religious freedom. Copyright© The National Center For Law & Policy. Reprinted with permission.