My wife and I have two children, and we had ultrasounds done during each pregnancy. Honestly, to me, the images on the screen looked more like those of an old black and white television after all the stations had gone off the air than those of a baby. I fail to see how looking at these snowy sonograms would convince any woman of the humanity of her preborn child, especially after she has already bought into the lies spewed by the "pro-choice" propaganda machine.
The big problem with this legislation is that it further codifies abortion into law. We don't need more laws on abortion, we need fewer. In fact, we need to wipe out all abortion laws and simply define a person as a human being at every stage of development. The Texas Penal Code already defines a person in this way; it is the regulations on abortion, many of them passed as "pro-life bills," that keep abortion legal. Any bill that ends with some form of "and then you can kill the baby" should never be considered a pro-life bill.
The proper function of government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of each individual human being. This protection should apply to EVERY human being, without regard to stage of development or any other factor (race, gender, etc.). To exclude any class of human beings from this protection is a failure of this principle of proper government.
When will Texas have a legislator who is principled enough to vote against any bill with specifies a legal condition under which one human being may kill another innocent human being? Do we allow parents to murder their teenage children after forcing them to look at baby pictures of those teenagers? Of course not. A person is a person at any stage of development, from embryo to infant to toddler to adolescent, etc. And yet, the powers that be consider this sonogram bill to be a pro-life bill. It is sad that legislators today care more about their one hundred percent pro-life voting record from right-to-life organizations or their endorsements from Texas Alliance for Life than they do about true principles. And what good are those ratings and endorsements when they come from organizations which are defined by 38 years of failure?
If I were a state legislator, I would vote against these current bills and propose one of my own. My bill would eliminate EVERY abortion law and regulation in Texas and would simply define a person as a human being at every stage of development. Abortion would then be treated as any other form of murder. If one would reject the myth that Roe v. Wade gave women a "constitutional right" to get an abortion and really read the majority opinion of the case, especially Footnote 54, one would see that personhood legislation would not violate any mandate of that decision.
It is time for all Texans, but especially our elected officials, to re-evaluate their own principles and to take a stand on those principles. Life is the most basic of rights, and it applies to all human beings. Government has no place in selecting which human beings deserve to have that right protected and which don't...
