This article first appeared at Red Pill Report, found here.
Abortion advocates and their various political arms like Planned Parenthood sent troops from all around the country to the frontlines in Austin, Texas, where Wendy Davis rallied the pro-abortion base to once again defend their sacred institution.
To say the least, the protesters didn’t
exactly paint the pro-abortion crowd in an appealing
light. Honestly, just how many Americans are you endearing to your
cause by having young girls hold signs saying “If I wanted the government in my womb,
I’d f*** a Senator,” or chanting “Hail Satan!” over a group of people singing
Amazing Grace? Even the UK Church of Satan took offense to the
latter, denouncing invocations of their Dark Lord’s name
for such “diabolical” purposes.
These protesters did, however, serve the
intended purpose-- for a brief moment.
Their attendance outwardly presented
widespread opposition to restrictive abortion laws for the news cameras, but
more importantly, the spectacle deterred focus from what abortion advocates
were actually arguing to preserve in Texas. Keeping the argument
vaguely about “choice” or “women’s rights” is a necessity, because the
orchestrators of the pro-abortion agenda know what would happen if broad
swathes of Americans choose to focus on what the debate is really about -- what
to do with the life inside a mother’s womb at 20-weeks’ gestation and
beyond.
These pro-abortion advocates’ ethically
inarguable position is that such a life can, and should be, legally ended on a
mother’s whim.
Not-so-questionable humanity
At 20 weeks, a fetus can hardly be described
as an inanimate lump of tissue.
“Ready for your big 20-week ultrasound?” asks writer Sarah Cohen in her piece for
women’s website She Knows, titled “Say Hello to
Baby.” “Ultrasound technology has improved a lot since its advent,”
she goes on. “If Baby cooperates, you can see fingers, toes, a
spine, and even a little face! Also, you may be able to see the
baby’s anatomy.”
In other words, the baby at 20-weeks’ gestation looks a lot like a human, right down to gender identity. According to noted abortion champion Michelle Goldberg, this can be “problematic” for the pro-abortion cause because “once a fetus has gestated to five or six months, most people, whatever their politics, can see its inherent human value.” And for some crazy reason, “most people, whatever their politics,” have an innate aversion to killing living things with “inherent human value.”
In other words, the baby at 20-weeks’ gestation looks a lot like a human, right down to gender identity. According to noted abortion champion Michelle Goldberg, this can be “problematic” for the pro-abortion cause because “once a fetus has gestated to five or six months, most people, whatever their politics, can see its inherent human value.” And for some crazy reason, “most people, whatever their politics,” have an innate aversion to killing living things with “inherent human value.”
The problem, which she recognizes, is that the argument that this “human value” should be legally snuffed out by a woman’s “choice” offers pretty thin gruel for most Americans.
“No pain? No problem!”
As the argument goes: “Fetuses don’t feel
pain” at 20 weeks, and therefore the moral issue is overstated, because
the fetus can’t feel its termination or the forceful extraction from its
mother’s womb.
It’s important that this argument be
understood in the proper context. Admittedly, this argument has
recently been a response to Republicans having cited studies, in the wake of
the Gosnell case, showing that fetuses do feel pain at 22 weeks, which led to
consideration of the Pain-Capable Unborn
Child Protection Act in the House,
for example. Pro-abortion advocates suggest that these studies are
false, and that fetuses don’t feel pain until later in pregnancy.
Studies exist to suggest that both
arguments could be scientifically correct. (Here and here, for example.) But the more
pressing question is, what is each argument’s end?
The pro-life argument is that if fetuses at
20-weeks’ gestation may feel pain, it is morally reprehensible to subject them
to such pain as would be involved in the abortion process. (Morally
reprehensible beyond stopping its heart and forcibly extracting it, that
is.) This is a sound argument, and indeed, it is understandably so
in nearly any estimation.
The pro-abortion argument, however, is that if
a fetus cannot feel pain, it is worthy of legal termination if a woman so
“chooses,” for whatever reason. For this to be true, we would have
to assume that feeling pain is the singular metric that signifies a life worthy
of existence, which is a wholly false assertion by any reasonable
estimation. Sensory receptors required for touch and pain are no
more required for a person to be deemed worthy of life than the sense of smell,
taste, sight, or hearing.
And indeed, if elements of sensory perception
are convincing metrics suggesting human life, fetuses at 20 weeks are hardly
devoid of such elements. His or her brain is rapidly developing the nerve
centers dedicated to the senses by this point, responding to a pronounced
changes in lighting, the sounds in the environment, and even the taste of amniotic fluid.
Too few to matter
So we can determine that most Americans would
recognize that babies at 20 weeks’ gestation are small humans -- if they were
to focus on what, exactly, is inside a mother’s womb by that point of a
pregnancy. And we’ve established that whether or not a fetus feels
pain should be rather inconsequential, unless you’re making an unreasonable
rebuttal to a silence a reasonable argument. Why, then, do abortion
advocates argue that late-term abortions should be legal?
They just don’t happen that often -- only 1.5%
of abortions are late-term, abortion advocates often claim.
It sounds so casual to say “only 1.5%,” but it
is worth noting, again and again, that with over one million abortions per
annum in America, this is more than 15,000 babies that will never exist on this
Earth because abortionists brutally confiscated their bodies from a mother’s
natural sanctuary. Again, if it can be reasonably assumed that a
fetus at 20 weeks has “inherent human value,” destroying that value is
tantamount to murder. And for context, consider that this small
percentage alone is roughly on par with annual murder levels in America in
recent years.
This “1.5%” is hardly insignificant by
practical measures.
The protections of Roe v. Wade
For years, Roe v. Wade has
been thought to protect the institution of abortion, the legal refuge of its
supporters. But in an interesting twist of fate, Roe v. Wade now
serves as protection for states like Texas in curtailing abortion.
Without question, in my opinion, Roe
v. Wade was an example (if not the example) of
unconstitutional judicial activism, which I argue in detail here, and my opinion aligns closely with that of
Justice White who wrote the dissenting opinion: “The Court simply fashion[ed]
and announce[d] a new Constitutional right for pregnant
women.” But the decision does leave considerable power with the
states to do precisely what Texas is now doing in terms of late-term
abortion. After the first trimester, states can reasonably define a
point of assumed “viability” and protect the “potential life” in the womb by
“proscribing abortion,” so long as the proscription does not directly endanger
the life of the mother.
Far too few Americans are aware of these
limitations in Roe v. Wade, and the most glaringly ignorant are
pro-abortion zealots. Whether or not the courts will decide to honor the
ruling and precedent if any Texas’ legislation comes under judicial review,
however, is yet to be seen.
An unwinnable argument
Late-term abortion advocates are losing, and
will continue to lose this debate. The ramparts from which they
mount their moral and scientific defense of the practice are easily reduced to
rubble in honest debate, which is why they typically avoid honest debate like
the plague. Any legal defense of a state ban on late-term abortion
is equally untenable. So they resort to their time-honored tactic of
broadly invoking “choice” to justify late-term abortion, a tactic which Kate
Pickert of Time magazine calls “a stance that seems
tone-deaf to current reality.”
Late-term abortion lobbyists like Wendy Davis,
with her theatrics and her circus troupe in tow, could offer only a temporary
distraction from the truth about the unquestionably abhorrent nature of
late-term abortion. Technology and a persistent morality have
allowed the terrible truth about late-term abortion to seep into our social
conscience, and rightfully, millions of Americans are addressing it at the state
level in efforts to end the practice.
Sideshows like the one in Austin, and other
such desperate attempts to avert the inevitable, won't do anything
to change that.
