Why are we pro-life? I mean seriously, why do we believe the way we do about abortion? Is it to prevent women from escaping the consequences of past actions? No, of course not. It is because we believe that unborn children possess the right to life that all born persons possess, from the moment of conception on. We need a law that recognizes this.
I read the Iowa bill, and it does not recognize the right to life of unborn children. It was also fairly obvious that it was going to get struck down and will continue getting struck down in appellate courts. It treats abortions as simple medical procedures to be regulated. There were exceptions for medical emergencies, and those medical emergencies included cases of rape (I could imagine men being falsely accused of rape by a mother intent on having her child killed). The administration of the new regulation was left to the Iowa Board of Health, not law enforcement. And it also assigned no civil or criminal liability to a woman upon whom an abortion was performed in violation of the new law. In other words, it wasn't much different from the Texas law that was struck down by Roe v. Wade. These next two paragraphs are taken directly from the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade...
When Texas urges that a fetus is entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection as a person, it faces a dilemma. Neither in Texas nor in any other State are all abortions prohibited. Despite broad proscription, an exception always exists. The exception contained [410 U.S. 113, 158] in Art. 1196, for an abortion procured or attempted by medical advice for the purpose of saving the life of the mother, is typical. But if the fetus is a person who is not to be deprived of life without due process of law, and if the mother's condition is the sole determinant, does not the Texas exception appear to be out of line with the Amendment's command?
There are other inconsistencies between Fourteenth Amendment status and the typical abortion statute. It has already been pointed out, n. 49, supra, that in Texas the woman is not a principal or an accomplice with respect to an abortion upon her. If the fetus is a person, why is the woman not a principal or an accomplice? Further, the penalty for criminal abortion specified by Art. 1195 is significantly less than the maximum penalty for murder prescribed by Art. 1257 of the Texas Penal Code. If the fetus is a person, may the penalties be different?
The Iowa fetal heartbeat bill didn't address any of these counters to the arguments made in Roe v. Wade 46 years ago. I'm sure that some of the legislators in Iowa had good intentions. But I'm also sure that a lot of them knew this bill would be struck down in court even before they passed it. So why did they even bother? I suspect that it was so they could claim to be making progress in the fight against abortion when they come up for re-election. "We passed the bill," they will say. "Re-elect me so I can try again." I'm tired of the lives of these unborn children being used as a political tool.
Texas HB896 is a much different kind of bill, removing all abortion regulations and exceptions and leaving the current legal definition of a person in the Texas Penal Code (which includes children from fertilization onward) and would treat an abortion as a homicide case.
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This one was posted mainly so I could tag the Texas legislators on my Facebook friends list...
Texas House Bill 896 would eliminate all regulations on abortion while also removing the exceptions for abortion in the Texas Penal Code regarding homicides. It would, in effect, enable a prosecution for murder for anyone who commits an abortion.
The Texas Prenatal Protection Act of 2003 set the definition of a person as "a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth." (Texas Penal Code 1.07 (26) and (38)). That act has been upheld in court several times since then, meaning that the courts regard that definition as Constitutional. Removing the exceptions for abortion, besides being the Constitutional, moral, and right thing to do, would put the courts in the awkward position of either saying that not all persons possess the right to life (which is what they said in regards to slavery in the Dred Scott case which was superseded by the 14th Amendment) or that Texas's definition of a person is not Constitutional even though they have already claimed that it is. We just need legislators (Matthew Krause, Bill Zedler, Jonathan Stickland, Phil King, Stephanie Klick, Kelly Hancock) to have the will and the courage to pass HB 896.
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And I wrote and posted this one last night after watching the Netflix documentary on Ted Bundy:
We live in murderous times. My wife and I watched the new Ted Bundy documentary on Netflix this past weekend, and I had thought about posting a sarcastic comment that the show was about how the State of Florida punished Bundy for exercising his right to choose. While I thought it would get a point across in a few words (people seem to read the shorter posts a lot more often than long ones like this one), I decided it was in bad taste. What Ted Bundy did was evil, monstrous, and repugnant. Killing a child in the womb is also all of those things.
But as I thought more about it, a line from the movie "Unforgiven" wouldn't leave my mind. Clint Eastwood is standing in a field talking to a young kid. They had just killed a man who had a bounty for mutilating a young prostitute, and the young kid was feeling regretful. Clint looks off into the distance and says, "It's a hell of a thing killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever going to have." It is one of my favorite movie lines of all time, and it summed up the theme of "Unforgiven" so succinctly.
Ted Bundy's victims were females, usually around 20 years of age. When he murdered them, he robbed them of all of the years they would have lived after that. Children killed in abortion are robbed of even more. They don't even get the 20 years that the young women did.
A lot cold cases are currently being solved with new technology that is being used to examine DNA evidence. No one really knows how many people Ted Bundy killed, but investigators are pretty sure that many of his victims have never been found. Somewhere out there in the mountains of Washington, Utah, and Colorado, trace evidence of those bodies remains. If they are ever found, their DNA can be extracted from those remains. DNA is a complex signature, proof that a human being, a person, lived on this earth. That unique DNA comes into being at fertilization, that incredible, magical, miraculous union between a sperm and an egg. The remains, the bodies, of children killed in abortion all contain DNA unique to each individual, evidence that that child lived on this earth. He or she existed before an abortionist ripped him or her from the womb.
Those who claim to be "pro-choice" will tell us that those children didn't live at all, that they were just blobs of tissue. They ignore the fact that all other "blobs of tissue" in a woman's body contain that woman's DNA signature. That embryo, fetus, baby has his or her own DNA. The science is irrefutable, which makes what the state of New York did this past week even more repugnant.
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