New York’s Reproductive Health Act decriminalizes abortion through all nine months, defines “person” as “a human being who has been born and is alive” and adds the caveat of “health” of the mother, a purposely undefined term meant to include all factors outlined in Doe v. Bolton that may impact the “well-being of the patient,” including mental and emotional stability, family situation and age.
Depressed after losing your job and getting dumped by your boyfriend at 36 weeks pregnant? No problem. New York will make sure you can have the abortion you say you need. All they’ll have to do is induce labor, partially deliver the baby, make an incision at the base of the skull and vacuum out its contents. Piece of cake.
Don’t let anyone try to tell you the late-term abortion protected in this bill is reserved for women whose lives are at risk. First, taking the life of a child in the third trimester does nothing to protect the life of the mother. Second, if that were the case, this bill would be unnecessary, as it was already the law in New York that practitioners could perform abortion through nine months to save the mother’s life. “Health” was added in this act to ensure that women had greater access to it should they desire.
The Reproductive Health Act has nothing to do with “reproductive health” at all, is based on political jargon rather than science and fundamentally devalues unborn life. We only need to look throughout history to see what happens when people in power dehumanize a vulnerable group: slavery, the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps, segregation, sex trafficking. They were and are (in the case of sex slavery) justified by the irrational and unscientific claim that the victims are less-than because of some immutable characteristic: their race, religion, nationality, age. The strong man profits off the defenselessness of the weak.
So it is with abortion today. Very few on the pro-choice side are willing to acknowledge that abortion brutally kills a child. It is simply the removal of a “clump of cells.” It is even difficult to find an online explanation of the abortion procedure that actually calls the unborn baby anything other than “tissue.” Dehumanization helps soothe the shame and is necessary for the public persona of abortion to remain positive. This is a central aim of Democrats, since Planned Parenthood, the nation’s number one abortion provider, is a key donor to the party. So protect abortion they must.
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The outrage in the wake of the law from pro-lifers, both conservative and moderate, is palpable. It’s also encouraging. Christian influencers who otherwise are generally quiet on politics have spoken up about the importance of protecting unborn life. I’ve received at least a hundred messages from young women telling me how heartbroken and inspired they are to volunteer and donate to their local pregnancy center. Praise God.
I think—and hope—that this act has shown otherwise ambivalent people exactly what the aim of the pro-choice movement has always been: abortion on-demand without apology through all nine months. Most people, whether the left likes it or not, just aren’t on board with that.
It is clearer than ever that abortion was never about “reproductive health" or rights or freedom. It is about feminists’ obsession with equality through homogeny. They believe that in order for women to be truly equal to men, all differentiations must eliminated as much as possible. So, since a man can physically walk away from an unwanted pregnancy, a woman should be able to, as well. With that reasoning, it’s easy to see why they want abortion permissible through nine months. It’s crucial to their cause.
But reality is a stubborn thing. No radical abortion legislation, no redefinition of gender or fed-up feminist can change the fact that while men and women are created equal, they are not created equally. They are not, and never will be, the same. Women will always be the only people who can get pregnant. They will always be the only people who have to deal physically with the trauma of miscarriage and abortion. And they and their children are the ones who will be hurt most by this atrociously immoral bill.
Those of us who have managed to escape the illogic of this Orwellian age understand this, and our eyes are open—for many, more than ever. Our motivation to pray, to serve mothers in crisis, to donate our resources to the centers and organizations saving lives and to speak up about the horror of abortion has been fiercely renewed.
So, for that, New York: thank you. You’ve helped the pro-life cause more than you know.
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