A Horror We Can’t Unknow
The truth is a funny thing. Once it’s let loose to confront and challenge and change, you can’t unknow it. That’s horrible news for Democrats, who’ve spent the last three weeks desperately trying to interrupt America’s attack of conscience on abortion.
The truth is a funny thing. Once it’s let loose to confront and challenge and change, you can’t unknow it. That’s horrible news for Democrats, who’ve spent the last three weeks desperately trying to interrupt America’s attack of conscience on abortion. For many people, who’ve come face to face with this brutal reality for the first time, there is no putting the lid back on this terrible evil our country’s spent 46 years justifying.
Most Americans will never unhear the cheers of the New York state legislature the moment it was legal to take an innocent life at birth. They’ll never unsee the survivors like Daniel Ritchie, now a 34-year-old pastor who doctors argued wasn’t “viable” because he was born without arms. And they’ll never understand how a political party can nominate a woman for president who believes that 5,597 babies torn limb from limb every year is too small of a percentage to care about.
Time magazine, the Washington Post, and New York Times can fact-check until the cows come home, but there’s no arguing the basic facts. Is late-term abortion legal? Yes. Is it violent and excruciatingly painful? Yes. Is the country opposed? Overwhelmingly. We can quibble over the numbers and argue about exceptions, but the deep-seated horror that Democrats will never be able to overcome remains: we are a country that kills our own children inside the womb — and refuses to save any who survived outside it.
Stacked against those truths, the old Democratic talking points are powerless. Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) fell back on some of those familiar lines Wednesday, when he tried to spin Donald Trump’s outrage at what New York has just done. Like other liberals, he wanted to steer the conversation away from the gory realities of late-term abortion to more comfortable ground. “He wants to roll back Roe v. Wade,” he fearmongered. “…Take us back to a time when women couldn’t get an abortion legally.”
Unfortunately for Cuomo, ending abortion no longer sounds like such a terrible idea in a country reeling from stories like Gianna Jessen, who was delivered in an abortion clinic after 18 hours of being burned alive in her mother’s womb. If it weren’t for nurses, who rushed her to the hospital before the abortionist could strangle or suffocate her, she would be dead. “Do not tell me these are not children,” she pleaded. “A heartbeat proves that. So do I.”
And yet doctors like Kristyn Brandi still claim that stories like Jessen’s don’t exist. Extreme late-term abortion, she told Time, “is not something that any person would come seeking, and it’s not something that any doctor would provide.” If that’s true, how does she explain the booming business of men like Kermit Gosnell and Douglas Karpen? Or Planned Parenthood’s catalogue of fully-developed baby body parts? Their discussions of “intact” babies should be of particular interest to anyone who claims these atrocities don’t happen.
These are not outliers, Arina Grossu warned Congress in 2016. Deborah Edge, one of Karpen’s staffers, testified with great emotion about how he would routinely kill babies born alive by either snipping their spinal cords, fatally injuring them with blows to the soft spot on their heads, twisting off their necks, or other horrid, unimaginable methods.
“When he did an abortion, especially in an over twenty-week abortion, most of the time the fetus would come completely out before he either cut the spinal cord or introduced one of the instruments into the soft spot [of the head] of the fetus in order to kill the fetus…I think every morning I saw several, on several occasions, if we had, maybe twenty patients of course, maybe ten or twelve or fifteen patients would be large procedures, and out of those large procedures, I’m pretty sure I was seeing at least three or four that were completely delivered in some way or another.”
No matter where you stand on abortion, the reality of what’s happening is “horrible,” President Trump told pro-lifers on a White House conference call yesterday. He knows as well as we do that sometimes the most painful truths are the ones that bring the change we’ve been waiting for. It will take all of us, but maybe one day America will look back on New York as the bright pink spire pointing everyone up — to where we should have been looking all along.
Originally published here.
A Late Turn on Late-Term Abortions
While Republicans make a determined march to the House floor every day to plead for the protection of born-alive babies, men and women around the country are flooding the states with their own measures. Hours of emotional debate are spilling over into assembly hearings in Vermont, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Illinois, and other places where liberals are digging in on an agency that puts them at odds with 77 percent of the country. The message from red and blue states seems to be the same: this issue isn’t going away any time soon.
In Indiana — like so many other statehouses — whatever legislative priorities were on the schedule are being pushed aside to deal with the crisis New York created. Unlike their neighbors in Illinois, who are determined to become the most radical state in the union on abortion, the Hoosiers are trying to stamp out a torturous procedure that rips babies limb from limb. Under House Bill 1211, doctors would no longer be allowed to perform dismemberment abortions or use instruments like clamps, forceps, and scissors to pull a baby from the womb. In a radical departure from the usual “health exception,” Indiana spelled out that those measures can only be taken if there is “serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function” to the woman.
When Democrats like State Rep. Dan Forestal (D) objected to some of the graphic testimony, Fort Wayne OB/GYN Christina Francis fired back, “Shouldn’t we be more uncomfortable that this is being done every day?” After all, Rep. Peggy Mayfield (R) argued, “Some people [think] abortion is a tidy little procedure like getting a shot or tooth pulled. That is not the case. This is a brutal procedure [that] should be banned.”
In North Carolina, where the legislative session isn’t underway, the dockets are already full of pro-life bills waiting to be filed. Proposals like Indiana’s to outlaw dismemberment abortions are on the table, as well as one of the better ideas moving through the states: a measure that would require doctors to tell patients about abortion-reversal pills. According to some studies, moms who take the high doses of progesterone to counteract the abortion drug have about a 65-68 percent chance of saving their babies. Even more encouraging, the side effects are minimal. According to the International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the “rate of malformations… is only slightly higher than the expected two to three-percent rate in the general population” — giving women with second thoughts about abortion a truly powerful option to change course.
Elsewhere, the universal outrage over the Democrats’ infanticide agenda is obviously falling on deaf ears in Arizona, where liberals had the gall to introduce language that would strip newborns of their born-alive protections. In a headline that ought to have every Arizonan at the capital protesting, Democrats actually filed a bill to repeal the lifesaving measures already in place for survivors of abortion. Under this HB 2696, there would be no resuscitation for babies born alive. Instead, they would be “allowed” to fight for their life without help on a cold, metal table. Incredibly, 17 of the Arizona House’s 30 Democrats sponsored the proposal.
Our friends at the Center for Arizona Policy could hardly believe their eyes. “The introduction of such an inhumane bill reveals how out of touch some lawmakers are to the majority of people they represent. Arizonans do not support the extreme abortion laws peddled by abortion activists.”
These leaders need to hear from you. If you live in Vermont, Illinois, New Mexico, Rhode Island, or Arizona, make sure your representatives know you won’t forget where they stand on the dignity of human life. The same goes for North Carolina and Indiana — encourage them in their push to give these innocent children the protection Democrats will not.
Originally published here.
CCCU Later, says Louisiana College
While some Christians seem willing to negotiate away some of their First Amendment freedoms, others refuse to stand by and watch truth be compromised. In a debate that’s threatening to tear apart an already fragile coalition of faith-based colleges and universities, the first real cracks are starting to show. As more schools consider leaving the umbrella organization of CCCU, others are wondering: will the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities finally get the message?
In December, when CCCU leaders endorsed a wildly unpopular bill called “Fairness for All,” a lot of conservatives gave them the benefit of the doubt. Unlike FRC, who’s been in the trenches for years and seen the damage that LGBT activists can do, CCCU was probably unaware of how dangerous negotiating with LGBT activists can be to the rest of the Christian community.
Now, two months into this “Fairness for Some” idea, the growing chorus of backlash to the endorsement doesn’t seem to be registering. Colleges that don’t want to capitulate to a movement that is trying to redefine human sexuality and trample upon religious freedom suddenly feel like they have no choice but to leave the Council and hope that their objections are heard. At Louisiana College, a Baptist school where I once served on the board of trustees, President Rick Brewer became the first to announce since December: the school is withdrawing from CCCU.
Brewer disagrees with council Vice Chair Susan Houghton, who says CCCU is “increasingly persuaded that the most viable political strategy is for comprehensive religious freedom protections to be combined with explicit support for basic human rights for members of the LGBT community.” Sometimes, Brewer wrote in his letter pulling LC’s membership, “The answer to such matters is to agree to disagree. But the import and impact of the ‘Fairness for All’ initiative calls for Louisiana College to respectfully disagree with the CCCU’s stance.” Although it has been a “long and beneficial relationship, Brewer may be the first of many to say, "By conviction I cannot endorse the ‘Fairness for All’ initiative nor be willfully associated with any entity that does.”
And he isn’t the only one. The U.S. Pastors Council, headed by “Houston Five” pastor Dave Welch, has also lined up against the organization’s stance. CCCU’s support for the bill is “a dangerous situation that is at its core a hostile rejection of God’s created order of male, female, marriage, church, moral law and civil law.” Equating “race, religion and [biological] sex to sexual behavior and mental instability” would open up a legal “Pandora’s Box,” he warned, that would result in “special rights for a few.”
If CCCU is willing to dialogue with the other side, hopefully its leaders will also take time to have a serious discussion with its own members, who have plenty of reservations about this well-intended — but dangerous — agenda.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.
