By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
October 24, 2003
To hear left-wing feminist comments on the Senate vote to stop partial-birth abortion, in which a late term infant is partly delivered but then killed by the abortionist before it can take its first breath, you’d think something had happened to end some sort of “right.” Actually, of course, the form of abortion declared illegal is a technique used nowhere else in the world. It was devised for one reason only – to evade allowing a viable infant to take his or her first breathe, thereby then having all the rights guaranteed a “person” under the Constitution of the United States.
Now, that is not to say that there are not nations that end the lives of infants it deems undesirable. In China, for example, if a woman has a baby that is not permitted by Chinese law, it is delivered, and THEN killed or allowed to die. While deplorable, that is at more honest and less barbaric than a partial-birth abortion.
It has been thirty years since the U.S. Supreme Court concluded, in a lengthy decision, that the “right to privacy,” declared an unalienable right by the Court, made laws against abortion “unconstitutional.” Strangely, the “right to privacy,” while allowing a woman to have an abortion, does not always extend to parents who wish to take their children out of public school and teach them at home or even, in some schools, the right take their children out of public school for a family vacation.
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said last week on the floor of the Senate, “I stand before you to tell you this is a very sad day for the women of America, a very sad day for the families of America, because what is about to happen here is this Senate is about to pass a piece of legislation that for the first time in history bans a medical procedure without making any exception for the health of a woman. This is a radical thing that is about to happen.
“Let's clear something up for the record. When the clerk read the bill, she said this is banning something commonly called partial-birth abortion. There is no such term in medicine as partial-birth abortion. There is either a birth or there is an abortion. There is a miscarriage. There is no such thing as partial-birth abortion. It is a made-up term to inflame passions.” Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women backed up Boxer’s statement saying, " This abortion procedures ban is a political game in which lawmakers in the pocket of the anti-abortion rights movement are using women's health and lives as the pawns to further a regressive agenda."
It’s true that it is not actually a medical term because it actually isn’t a medically necessary, safe or recommended medical procedure. It certainly IS a political issue. Any gynecologist knows full well how to save the life of both an infant and the mother if there is some sort of problem that occurs in the late weeks of pregnancy. As a woman who had late term problems occur in most of my six pregnancies, I am well aware of the deceit that has been involved in this issue since the procedure was thought up almost ten years ago.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s when I was having children, such a barbaric procedure would have made most women throw up at the thought of it. Today, some women claim it a “moral right” to slaughter their offspring in such a manner.
This is at least the 4th time this bill has passed the House of Representatives, by large majorities. It passed both the House and Senate twice in the Clinton Administration, and Clinton vetoed it twice on the claim it did not “protect the health” of mothers. Actually, the “health protection” argument in 2003 is a red herring. The pro-abortion lobby has and will in court demand that the procedure be allowed in the kind of “health” problems I had, which was high blood pressure that required almost complete bed rest and induced deliveries in half my six pregnancies.
Yet, I note with my daughters and younger female friends that medical knowledge has advanced to such a point that babies are being saved at earlier and earlier developmental periods. Several of my grandchildren definitely would not have lived had they been born to me, my mother or grandmother. In fact, both my grandmother and my mother’s younger brother did not survive his delivery.
I have always believed that women who don’t want children should not have to have them. No innocent child should be saddled with a self-centered and selfish mother. Women today who do not want children have plenty of cheap and easy ways of avoiding getting pregnant in the first place. Abortion is not needed today at all, if it ever was.
Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) yesterday described the Partial-Birth Abortion procedure as when the abortionist, “deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside of the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, [that is, feet first] any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside of the body of the mother ..... Now, that specificity of talking about the way in which the child is delivered and then killed is fundamentally different than anything we had before.” Following Santorum’s statement, Sen. Boxer huffed, “I take deep offense at that language--deep offense. Women do not want to kill their child.”
If women don’t want to kill their child, why have we had 44 million abortions since Roe v Wade? Why do we have so much more child abuse? Why are our homes falling apart? I remember when abortion was being advocated to PREVENT child abuse. It has made child abuse a “right.”
I cannot get over the hypocrisy of those who claim to be horrified that black people were designated as “property,” not persons by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in an 1856 U.S. Supreme Court decision. We fought the Civil War to straighten that Supreme Court decision out. Yet, today those who claim to be horrified at the Dred Scott decision, people like Senator Barbara Boxer, are furious that most of us do not believe unborn babies are merely the “property” of their mothers and therefore can be disposed of in any manner they so “choose” - up to and including murder by partial birth abortion.
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com