Let’s compare and contrast the following two items. Taken together, they are hugely revealing.

The first is a tweet sent out Wednesday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton:

Second, there is this headline for the abortion-obsessed New York Times editorial page: “Make Abortion More Available During the Pandemic — Not Less.”

We wrote yesterday about the amusing (in a perverse sort of way) pro-abortion conceit that pro-lifers are “taking advantage of the Coronavirus.“ 

Of course this is the usual pro-abortion attempt to shift our eyes away from the obvious: it is the abortion industry and its seemingly endless list of media admirers who are trying to leverage a tragedy. (It is very, very much like what Democrats attempted to do with the fiscal stimulus package.)

As a big-time newspaper, The Times’ editorial recycles this malarkey along the customary lines. Here’s how it works.

In order to preserve supplies of life-saving PPEs [Personal Protective Equipment] and to “flatten the curve” of the COVID-19 pandemic, states are urging that all elective surgeries be postponed. The Times’ editorial page channels a statement put out by the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (and others) that “Abortion is an essential component of comprehensive health care.”

So, there shouldn’t be a prohibition on elective abortions, The Times argues. But…..there is much more on their list of agenda items.

On the theory that you “never let a crisis go to waste,” the editorial page argues that “A lack of timely access to abortion” is all the more reason to promote two of its long, long-standing objectives.

First, make it easy as pie to obtain the two abortifacients that make up “medication” abortions –mifepristone and misoprostol. They write:

Given the coronavirus pandemic, it is incumbent on the F.D.A. to relax its regulation on mifepristone, at least temporarily. Doing so would allow many women to get a prescription for abortion-inducing drugs from a doctor via telemedicine, at which point the medications could be mailed to the patient.

Note the irony. Earlier in the editorial, they whine that once abortion clinics close, often they do not re-open. 

But any “temporary” relaxation would be difficult to reinstate. However, the Times doesn’t care that “The F.D.A. says that the regulation, known as a REMS (risk evaluation and mitigation strategy), is needed ‘to ensure that the benefits of the drug outweigh its risks.’” 

Why? Because “reproductive rights experts [the usual array of pro-abortion researchers who grind out study after study] note that the drug is very safe and argue that it is overregulated.”

As I wrote yesterday, “It is impossible to persuade any abortion advocate to acknowledge the number of women whose deaths are associated with the use of chemical abortifacients. Or the thousands and thousands of ‘adverse events,’ many of which are very, very serious.”

The second objective The Times and the Abortion Industrial Complex are trying to accomplish by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic is to end the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment  prevents almost all federal funding of abortion and is credited with saving well over two million lives. Prior to the Hyde Amendment, as NRLC testified, “[B]y 1976, the federal Medicaid program was paying for about 300,000 elective abortions annually, and the number was escalating rapidly.”

Dressed up in concern “for the poor,” the objective (never stated but inevitable) of gutting the Hyde Amendment is to reverse the steady diminution in the number of abortions. 

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, “Approximately 862,320 abortions were performed in 2017, down 7% from 926,190 in 2014.” 

Consider how far we have come in the right direction. In 1990, 1.6 million unborn babies lost their lives! From an industry and a political party (the Democrats) who believe there will always be an “unmet need” for more killing, the Hyde Amendment is insufferable.

Pro-lifers have—and will continue—not only to make unassailable case that elective abortions are not “essential medical services,” but also fight the assault launched by Planned Parenthood and its enablers in Congress and the states against laws that protect both women and unborn children.