On the issue of human life, there are two very opposing visions at work in our country.
Through the vast network of pregnancy resource centers and maternity homes, the pro-life movement has exerted every effort to love, support and protect women and children. Today, nearly half the nation protects life when babies in the womb have heartbeats or can feel the excruciating pain of abortion.
The other vision, the pro-abortion vision, run by the abortion industry and activists, have set their extreme end goal of abortion on demand for any reason, even up until the moment of birth.
When asked if they support any limit on abortion, they tow the party line of "I support whatever a woman and her doctor decide." That dodge does not answer the question and fails to disclose that a woman and her doctor can decide to terminate for any reason, including gender preferences. This vision allows women who prefer a baby boy to a baby girl to terminate the life of their child all the way up to nine months just because they were the "wrong" sex.
This dark vision means gruesome late-term abortions could become normalized procedures and the trauma they inflict on post-abortive mothers would be downplayed or ignored. Survivors of botched abortions would be left to suffer their first and last minutes outside the womb alone, cold and in excruciating pain – because pro-abortion radicals have fought against policies requiring they be afforded basic medical care.
In the abortion activist’s utopia, all pregnancy resource centers and maternity homes would be shuttered despite all the financial and physical resources they provide women and their kids. This is wildly unpopular with the American people, as polling from this year shows 91% of Americans support them. They would even want to force pro-life or ambivalent Americans to shut up and fund these procedures in their health care plans.
What a horrifying, dystopian vision, right?
Tragically, this vision is already a reality in some places throughout our country.
To date, six states plus our nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., allow abortion up until birth, while 17 states do not offer protections for babies that can feel the pain of dismemberment abortions in the womb. But Democrats and abortion activists say these states don’t go far enough to fight for even more radical policies that don’t serve women or save children.
For example, in Maine they’re voting to pass a bill allowing abortion at any point up to birth. Supporters of the bill claim such late-term abortions would only be allowed if "deemed necessary by a licensed physician," but anyone who has followed abortion policy throughout the past half-century knows that such loopholes have been exploited for pretty much any reason, including "mental," "emotional" and even "financial" health.
ABORTION-BY-VENDING-MACHINE IS MUCH WORSE THAN IT SOUNDS
As if that weren’t enough, Maine’s state Senate blocked a proposed amendment that would have put limits on the trafficking of fetal remains from late-term abortions.
In Maryland, this past year an "all-trimester" abortion clinic opened. Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin admitted that there isn’t a single limit on abortion that he supports. "It’s up to women to make that decision," he said.
And who could forget, the jaw-dropping admission from former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who shamelessly voiced his support for infanticide on air. Northam’s words rightly shocked Americans, many of whom thought they’d never live to see an America where babies were killed after birth.
But elective up-to-birth abortions are real. A shameless, recent feature in the Atlantic glamorized the nauseating history of Colorado’s late-term abortionist Dr. Warren Hern. Hern, the article writes, "has been performing late abortions for half a century."
Disturbingly, Hern shared that half, if not more, of the women who come to his clinic do not have "medical diagnoses" for late-term abortions but he performs abortions for them anyway. Hern aborted one baby simply because her mother decided she didn’t want to have a little girl.
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"He said he’d done abortions for sex-selection twice," the Atlantic piece read, "...it was their choice to make." Hern also refused to allow viability concerns to restrict his business. Instead, he believes that "the viability of a fetus is determined not by gestational age but by a woman’s willingness to carry it."
Similarly, in Washington, D.C., a total lack of limits on abortion leaves women and children exposed to dangerous horrors, like from late-term abortionist Cesare Santangelo. Just last year, the nation was shocked at the discovery of five fully-formed, mutilated bodies of aborted babies in a box headed for the incerator, possibly victims of illegal partial birth abortions, linked to his late-term abortion facility the Washington Surgi Clinic.
Santangelo is also currently the subject of a medical malpractice lawsuit alleging that an abortion he performed caused a woman’s death. To date, nothing has been done to achieve justice for Santangelo’s victims, much less the countless other Americans lost every single year to the horrors of abortion.
This is exactly the future that pro-abortion activists are fighting for, and it is why those of us in the pro-life movement have to fight back harder than ever to enact basic, commonsense protections for babies and moms.
Through our continued efforts and loving commitment, I believe we can combat the Democrat and abortion activists’ goal of abortion on demand up to birth. And I look forward to our vision for America that one day all our nation’s states will respect the inherent humanity of every human life – regardless of being in or out of the womb.
