“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” This observation by King Solomon rings true — and loudly – in 2019 America. Arguably the most intense and divisive year in the abortion wars, 2019 reminds us all of the dangers of forgetting our history, which one political party seems committed to repeat.
Kicking off 2019 with New York’s Reproductive Health Act, New York Democrats renewed their resolve to repeat the judicial tyranny of their party’s history by treating some human beings as an inferior class of non-persons. This 2019 Act is disturbingly reminiscent of the 1857 Dred Scott vs. Sandford ruling, which denied personhood to African American Dred Scott. Seven Democrats on the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott, while temporarily residing in American territory that declared African American men free persons, was not truly a person after returning to Missouri with his “slave-owner,” a Captain John Emerson. The court declared that Scott was the property of Emerson’s wife (Emerson having already passed), and as a non-citizen with no rights of personhood, Scott could be treated as any other form of property owned by Emerson’s wife, Eliza Sandford. Summarizing the case, Chief Justice Roger [racist] Taney, wrote: “A black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect.”
What has been will be again.
In January of 2019, New York’s Reproductive Health Act, declared that while unborn human beings may have certain personhood rights in other territories of America, New York’s unborn children have no rights of personhood and can be treated as property through the moment of birth. Denying the personhood of the unborn in the most extreme way, New York legislators even declared that murderers of pregnant women will only be charged with one count of homicide. Channeling the historical discrimination of his party, New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo sent the same message as Taney did so long ago: An unborn human has no rights a born human is bound to respect. Since then, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Vermont have passed similar, radical legislation.
Shortly after the New York Reproductive Health Act passed, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam went on WTOP radio to publicly defend Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran’s bill that would legalize abortion to point of birth. Likely realizing that there is no meaningful difference between a full-term baby about to be born and that same baby just after birth, Northam went a step further by saying that mothers and physicians should be able to have conversations about whether born babies should be left to die or not. In response to Northam’s clinically cool demeanor describing infanticide, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse brought the Born-Alive Abortion Survivor’s Protection Act (BAASPA) for a vote in the Senate. The bill would have done three simple things:
- Require that babies born-alive during a failed abortion-attempt be immediately transferred to a hospital.
- Require that the “same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child” is applied to babies born-alive during a failed abortion as would be granted to any other child born at the same gestational age.
- Require that any violation of these rules be reported by a health practitioner or employee of a hospital, physician’s office, or abortion clinic. An abortionist who violates these rules and kills an infant born-alive will be punished for intentionally killing a human being. Lastly, the mother of a child born-alive may not be prosecuted.
Each of these requirements is very important, because while the 2002 Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (which gained unanimous consent from Republican and Democrat senators) specifies that babies who survive abortions and are born are to be recognized as human beings with human rights, the bill did not define what types of care, if any, are to be rendered. Nor did it specify what punishments would be levied against “physicians” who failed to act to save the life of an abortion-survivor.
Tragically and predictably, Senate Democrats took their cue from racist Democrats in the early 20th century who routinely filibustered every Republican effort to enact an antilynching law. Ideological consistency can be a dangerous thing. According to the reasoning of Democrats of that day, if blacks were truly not persons, then lynching them — they’d claim — would be no more morally problematic than killing an animal, as many racists described African Americans.
Today we see the same ideology leading to the dehumanization and slaughter of the unborn. Both African Americans and unborn human persons have died on the altar of an evil ideology.
And so, “what has been done will be done again.” In February of 2019, the United States Senate voted in majority favor (53-44) of the BAASPA. However, the bill didn’t gain the 60 votes necessary to overcome the filibuster initiated by Democrat senators. Additionally, only 3 Democrat Senators crossed the aisle to vote for protecting newborns from abortionists. And all of the Democratic Senators running for President voted against the BAASPA!
It seems filibustering bills that would prevent discrimination and violence against actual innocent human persons (while simultaneously denying that they’re persons) is a Democratic party trademark. As of December 2019, Senate Democrats have blocked a vote on the BAASPA over 80 times. By refusing to pass the BAASPA, Senate Democrats are enabling abortionists to kill born-alive infants that they failed to kill in the womb. But this pales in comparison to Senate Democrats’ support of abortion-on-demand, which takes the lives of nearly one-million babies every year in America.
Left’s purging of apostates
When abortion is treated as sacrosanct, politics becomes liturgy: a spiritual practice engaged in for the purpose of praising and protecting that which is sacred. Therefore, anyone who questions the Left’s political liturgy is an apostate and must be purged and exchanged for those sufficiently “woke” to the escalating political threat posed by those “pro-lifers.”
In order to protect their “liturgical purity,” Planned Parenthood fired their new president, Dr. Leana Wen in July 2019. Buzzfeed News, who broke the story, reported that there were “internal concerns over her [Wen’s] management style and a perceived shift away from the group’s political work (emphasis own).”
A source familiar with the matter said that “her removal was accelerated by the intensifying battle over abortion rights, saying that she was not the right leader in this climate.” Wen herself confirmed all this in her Twitter statement saying, “I believe that the best way to protect abortion care is to be clear that it is not a political issue but a health care one (emphasis own).”
Wen was quickly ousted. A movement based on the belief that human value is found in your “wanted-ness,” it’s unsurprising that Planned Parenthood, the political war hawk of the pro-choice movement, will quickly abort its own, whose apostasy renders them “unwanted.” Wen was quickly replaced by Alexis McGill Johnson, a lifelong political activist, and more of the Cecile Richards mold than Wen ever was.
This is noteworthy because Planned Parenthood is publicly dropping its “healthcare” organizational façade and fully embracing its identity as a political machine. Ironically, removing this “healthcare” mask will likely further damage their reputation and cause more Americans to distance themselves from the organization. Americans are not interested in supporting a political hackery of a machine focused on enshrining “abortion rights” through the day of birth. According to a 2019 Gallup Poll, only 25% of Americans believe abortion should be legal under any circumstances (the de facto position of Planned Parenthood). In fact, a 2007 Gallup Poll found that 72% of Americans think late-term abortions should be illegal, a procedure euphemistically described by the abortion juggernaut as “reproductive health care.”
California chemical abortions
Not to be outdone by East Coast radicals in New York, California Governor, Gavin Newsom moved to establish himself in the abortion hall of fame books by signing SB24, a move that makes pro-abortion, former Governor, Jerry Brown look pro-life. In fact, Brown vetoed the bill in 2018. Introduced under the guise of combatting abortion access problems, this bill will force California 4-year state universities (Cal State and UC) to provide the RU-486 abortion pill to students through university health centers.
According to the bill’s sponsor, Connie Leyva, “Students shouldn’t have to travel off campus or miss class or work responsibilities in order to receive care that can easily be provided at a student health center.” Ignoring for the moment that slaughtering unborn children is not “care,” Leyva blatantly ignores the fact that former Governor Jerry Brown rightly pointed out that “the average distance to abortion providers in campus communities varies from five to seven miles, not an unreasonable distance.”
Despite easily accessible resources such as this Youtube video, many “pro-choice” advocates don’t know or care how the abortion pill kills a baby. An RU-486 chemical abortion is offered through 10 weeks gestation. A pregnant woman first takes Mifepristone, which blocks the hormone progesterone, without which the lining of the uterus breaks down, cutting off blood and nourishment to the baby, who is starved to death. One or two days later, she takes misoprostol, forcing her uterus to have contractions, in order to dispel her dead baby in the toilet. Not only does the abortion pill kill a human being, but it also poses threats to the health and life of the women taking it. While the “combatting abortion access problem” is clearly a guise for Newsom and the bill’s defenders, it is a guise they must maintain, because the reality is too ghoulish for even the most ardent pro-choice advocates.
According to the FDA, risk & effects include: Abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, heavy bleeding, even maternal death. They further report that 24 women have died taking RU-486, average bleeding lasts 9-16 days and 8% of women will endure bleeding more than 30 days. It gets worse. According to a 2000 Oxford University Press study, the average failure rate of a medication abortion is eight percent. Live Action News points out that “an eight percent failure rate means that about one in every 12 chemical abortion attempts will be unsuccessful, which means women will need to be subjected to a surgical abortion, which, of course, also has its own risks.” Left undiagnosed and untreated, the eight percent of women whose babies were not properly dispelled will be walking around with a dead baby in their uterus, thus susceptible to sepsis and death. As such, the FDA has requirements for prescribers of the abortion pill, including that “providers must also be able to provide any necessary surgical intervention… and must be able to ensure that women have access to medical facilities for emergency care.” Because university health centers are not equipped with surgical abortion instruments or staff qualified or licensed to perform surgical abortions, Newsom will endanger the health and lives of young women who show up to their health centers bleeding and in immense pain, only to be turned away or pointed toward Planned Parenthood. All this under the mantle of “healthcare.”
Naturally, neither Newsom, Leyva or any of the other bill’s supporters, addressed these concerns. Ignoring reality and its consequences in favor of ideology is nothing new for the abortion juggernaut. In fact, in June of 2018, Cecile Richards, then President of Planned Parenthood, wrote an LA Times opinion editorial in which she claimed that “non-invasive medication abortion is safe by all measures — safer than Tylenol and Viagra, even.” Here’s a perfect example of the linguistic gymnastics that are required by abortion advocates who call a medication safe when its success is gauged on whether its target was murdered.
The first legislation of its kind, SB24 will turn 4-year California state universities into abortion clinics, a far cry from the purpose for which the academy was designed. In a failed sleight of hand, the abortion industry and their cronies have shown their hand and it clearly has nothing to do with real “choice.” Failing to provide any type of funding for nurseries or daycares on college campuses and fully willing to endanger the actual health and lives of college-aged women in their pursuit of expanding abortion, it is clear that the only “choice” Newsom is interested in pushing is abortion. Most concerning of all, however, is California’s reputation as a political bellwether in the abortion wars. The moral decay that starts in the Golden State rarely stays in state.
Abortion: destroyer of bi-partisan, national unity
An unprecedented and tragic year for unborn babies and human equality, 2019 serves as a lesson that there can be no bi-partisan or national unity when one political party publicly commits itself to the slaughter of unborn children through the day of birth, even refusing to condemn infanticide and ensure better protections for infants who survive abortions. However, this is not the first time our two-party system has been divided over who is a person.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Woefully ignorant to reality, today’s Democratic Party seems to have forgotten that the last time they fought against human equality it led to a war that they lost. This is because, invited or not, reality has an annoying tendency of reasserting itself in our lives. It was self-evidently true that African-Americans were human persons with the same human dignity as everyone else. It is similarly self-evidently true that unborn human beings conceived by human parents are little persons who also share the same dignity. We can either respond to that self-evident reality by aligning our beliefs, lives, and policies correctly, or we can stick our head in the ground and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. But in the end, reality will win out.
Either historically describing the Democratic party during slavery, or prophesying the nature of that same party today, George Orwell, speaking through his character Winston said:
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
In other words, when you base your entire ideology on fantasy, your ideas, foolish though they may be, will merely be a reflection of your ideology. When your worldview leads you to label common sense observations, such as blacks and babies are persons, as heresy, you know you’re on the wrong road. And as C.S. Lewis aptly pointed out, the true progressive is the one who, realizing he is on the wrong road, makes an about-turn and walks back to the right road.
Will the abortion juggernaut and its strategic arm, the Democratic party, learn from the mistakes of history and prove their progressiveness by walking back to the right road? I desperately hope and pray so. But I’m not holding my breath.
Trump: Boon to pro-life movement
And the pro-life movement hasn’t been holding its breath. While 2019 saw a significant rise in pro-abortion radicalism and legislation, this rise correlates directly to the threat posed by what has become the most pro-life administration in American history. After eight years of the most pro-abortion president our country has ever seen, the Trump administration gave a weary pro-life movement the political encouragement necessary to catapult them back onto the offensive.
In his first year alone, President Trump proved to be more pro-life than either Reagan or Bush, appointing pro-life judges, permitting states to defund Planned Parenthood of Title X funds, stopping the overseas funding of abortion, cutting Planned Parenthood’s tax funding by $60 million, and creating a new office of conscience protections at HHS, among many more. Encouraged to know that this administration was on their side, pro-life legislators across the country, all began implementing pro-life laws, with the intent of presenting a credible challenge to Roe v. Wade.
It was this rising threat that led New York Governor Cuomo to pass the Reproductive Health Act. Clearly on the defensive, Cuomo rationalized his support of the bill, saying “Kavanaugh is going to reverse Roe v. Wade. I have no doubt. Gorsuch is going to reverse Roe v. Wade. I have no doubt.” The abortion industry and their political pawns are scared. This should greatly encourage the pro-life movement. And it has.
Americans United for Life released their Fall 2019 State Legislative Sessions Report. They report that “so far in 2019, 58 life-affirming laws passed and were signed into law across 22 states, representing a more than 25% increase from 2018.” Laws ranging from informed consent, parental involvement, heartbeat, abortion-survivor protections, and down-syndrome protections; these laws are saving lives.
Dr. Michael New of the Charlotte Lozier Institute has researched the effect of state anti-abortion laws and found a direct correlation between the number of pro-life laws and a decrease in the number of abortions. This spike in pro-life legislation has led Planned Parenthood to stick their head further in the ground, launching a campaign titled “Bans Off My Body,” repeating the decades’ old trope that the unique human life you pay a “physician” to intentionally dismember is actually just part of your body.
The pro-life movement heads into election year with massive victories and substantial momentum. Contrastively, the abortion juggernaut is limping into 2020 and their political cronies will soon face an electorate that is growing increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of abortion through point of birth. One of the abortion juggernaut’s political backers will become the nominee and face the President in debate, who in 2016 correctly defined abortion as “rip[ping] the baby out of the womb.” That moral clarity on abortion will destroy any euphemistic attempts by the Democratic nominee to appeal to the voters with a “reproductive health care” pitch.
163 years after the Dred Scott decision, the Democratic party is still the enemy of human equality. They are still dehumanizing a certain class of human beings by defining personhood according to randomly and arbitrarily selected criteria. As Scott Klusendorf rightly points out, “We used to discriminate on the basis of skin color and gender (and still do at times), but now with elective abortion, we discriminate on the basis of size, level of development, location, and degree of dependency. We’ve simply swapped one form of bigotry for another.”
The consequences of that bigotry are the 62 million babies who have been slaughtered in the last 47 years. And now, as in 1857, the Republican party is the only political party staying the madness and attempting to enshrine rights of personhood to every human being. Until the Democratic party and the pro-choice movement choose to bring something new under the sun, what has been will be again: The Democratic party will again be remembered as the party of discrimination and have to account for instituting and protecting the greatest genocide in human history.
