The House passed a historic piece of legislation last week that prohibits late term abortion.

The “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” – introduced by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) along with 187 co-sponsors and passed in the House by a vote of 228 to 196 – prohibits abortion after 20 weeks.

As Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) noted in her remarks, science is clear that, at the end of the second trimester of pregnancy, the unborn child feels pain.

This initiative was a response in the House to the outrage triggered by the Kermit Gosnell tragedy, with the Philadelphia abortion doctor recently convicted of murdering three children through late term abortions.

While science and common sense make it clear that a child in the womb after 5 months is living, moving, and feeling, our President – who likes to present himself as a man of compassion – has wasted no time in promising to veto this bill. In fact, he doesn’t even want to have the conversation.

Immediately after the bill passed the House, the Executive Office of the President issued a statement saying that this bill was “an assault on a woman’s right to choose” and that if presented with the bill, the President’s “senior advisors would recommend that he veto” it.

Does a woman’s “right to choose” really include murder?

Don’t the American people at least deserve an explanation from their President as to why a child – moving and feeling in its mother’s womb – is not life? And if it is life, why it is not murder to kill this child? And if it is murder, why should it be legal in a nation that claims to be civil, moral, and free?

You might think that differences in ideas and values are what divide our country, but perhaps the real divider is words.

Who would challenge the words in our Declaration of Independence, written almost two and a half centuries ago, that “all Men are created equal” with rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?

Today, a black man sits in the White House, but at the time of our nation’s founding, black skin was enough to disallow a man from being legally considered a man.

Americans look back in disbelief that this was once so – that someone who looked just like our President couldn’t even be treated like a human being.

We’re still having a hard time with words – especially the word “life.” Perhaps with no small amount of irony, the black man in the White House, who once might not have been considered a “man,” cannot accept that a child is “life.”

Even worse, our President doesn’t want to even discuss this very painful issue.

Most Americans have a real problem with legal late-term abortions. In a 2011 Gallup poll, 79 percent of those who are “pro-choice” and 94 percent of those who are “pro-life” said third trimester abortion should be illegal. Fifty two percent of those “pro-choice” and 90 percent of those “pro-life” said second trimester abortions should be illegal.

When the majority of the American people see the grave moral problem of late term abortion, shouldn’t they hear from their President? Shouldn’t he defend the legality of this moral outrage? At the very least, he should recognize and respond to the overwhelming concerns borne by most American citizens.