As this column is being written, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are engaged in congressional hearings exploring the ramifications of last month's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the two Supreme Court decisions that allowed for abortion-on-demand in America.
This is a very good thing.
Democrats are raising every expected objection to the anti-abortion position most Republicans hold, including the recent, horrific story of a 10-year-old girl who was raped and impregnated by an illegal immigrant in Ohio. Republicans must now defend their position and face the reality of what their pro-life position will mean to these rare instances.
As uncomfortable as it may be for pro-life proponents and politicians to confront this issue, it's vital to debate it head-on.
This debate was preempted in 1972 by the arbitrary and extra-constitutional fiat crafted out of whole cloth by the justices who affirmed Roe. It stopped any real discussion of this critical issue in its tracks, and for 50 years, the debate was engaged only through the context of presidential appointments to the Supreme Court.
Now, things get real. Now, the debate will have an impact on each state's laws and medical guidelines for this serious medical procedure. Good. This is how it should be.
If Republican politicians are unable to argue why an impregnated 10-year-old rape victim should not be legally permitted to destroy the life growing inside her as a result of this evil, violent act, those Republicans should adjust their positions or get off the stage and allow a more capable politician to argue the case for them.
Meanwhile, as Republicans grapple with this new reality, they must also seize the moment and force their political adversaries to defend their extreme position on the issue as well.
At this point, Democrats seem incapable of conceding that only women get pregnant in the first place. It may seem difficult to debate the abortion issue with a political monolith that refuses to acknowledge that men are incapable of bearing a child, but this is the unreal reality the political left has forced on our public discourse, and Republicans should keep pressing the issue to reveal how outside reality their opponents are.
Democrats also have a few vulnerabilities in this horror story out of Ohio.
First and foremost, they must reckon with their despicable behavior in presenting this nightmare scenario as a weapon to hammer the six justices who ruled on Dobbs and pro-life supporters who celebrated it. President Biden and his pro-abortion cheerleaders were quick to promote this story when there was literally no corroboration or validation for the initial sketchy reports coming from an abortionist in Indiana.
To the abortion enthusiasts, the victimization of this little girl was merely an opportunity to make an emotional argument in favor of more votes this November. "For God's sake," Biden blasphemously pleaded as he invoked the Almighty as a device to trigger turn-out in the upcoming election.
Biden and the Democrats raged with white-hot fury over the six justices and pro-life Republicans and had nary a word of condemnation for the real evil villain in this story: THE RAPIST.
A little girl gets assaulted and impregnated by her evil attacker, and the Democrats turn their anger on the Supreme Court. They never even went through the process of checking to see if the story was true. For a week, journalists tried to verify the origins of this alleged rape, and even Biden's propaganda paper, the Washington Post, shed serious doubt on it.
Finally, yesterday, an arrest was made. The suspect is an illegal immigrant who has been protected from deportation by the Democrats' failed immigration policies.
As the president and his party viewed this story's development, their one and only approach to it was that the only horror worth mentioning was that the 10-year-old girl would be forced, under some states' laws, to carry the unborn baby to term. That's it. That's all they saw here. The real crime, they opined, was the lack of abortion.
Now, to be clear, this story is nauseating and heartwrenching, and the plight of this girl and her family touch the very core of any human being's emotions and sensibilities. Further, the righteous anger for justice and the most severe punishment against this evil rapist must be something we can all agree on, even if we can't join in our outrage over the fact that this piece of dirt should never have been in our country in the first place.
If pro-life politicians are serious about their position, they must return to the fundamental and undeniable issue at hand with every discussion of abortion: What is the unborn?
The human fetus growing inside a womb is a nascent human life. Regardless of the circumstances of its creation, it is what it is. Whether born from a romantic encounter with the full intent of procreation, from a drunken one-night-stand, or even from this unspeakable act of violence, the one consistent truth is that the fetus is a human life.
And innocent human lives should not be allowed to be destroyed out of convenience.
This is the fundamental truth underlying the pro-life movement, and the scientific and moral truth supporting this position is undeniable. It's what gives the position such strength.
However, the rest of the country is not aligned with this position as of now.
We have just come off nearly 50 years of abortion on demand, for whatever reason, and at any moment of the nine-month gestation period. Our country is not going to turn on a dime and retract that level of abortion access within weeks of the Dobbs decision. It just won't.
Recent polls suggest that a vast majority of Americans agree with prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A smaller majority would move that window back, and many would prohibit all abortions except in the case of rape or incest.
The debate is engaged right now, live, before our eyes. And we, the people, through our elected representatives, will have the final say. Finally.
If the only abortions we as a nation allow would be for girls like this tragic case in Ohio, I suspect most pro-life advocates would rest easy knowing that we've gone from nearly one million abortions in this country per year to merely a handful that only applies to the most extraordinary, horrible circumstances.
If we as a nation end up with the majority of our states taking the 15-week position or allowing for abortions in the case of rape or incest, it would not be a pure and perfect pro-life resolution. But, it would be a democratically-arrived position, not a judicial command.
