Much of the debate on the new anti-abortion laws in Georgia
and Alabama has centered on Alabama’s lack of an exception for rape and incest
victims. While the Georgia
law does contain such an exception, some pro-abortion advocates argue that
it is not broad enough. After watching the abortion debate over the past 30
years or so, I can say without reservation that no matter what exceptions the
authors of the bill had carved out, it would not be enough for the pro-abortion
lobby.
Since I first became aware that abortion was legal, a mind-blowing
revelation to an elementary school student, I’ve followed the debate and legal
wrangling that has been involved with probing the limits of Roe v. Wade. In that time, I cannot
recall a single example of any restriction on abortion, no matter how trivial
or rational, that has not been opposed by the abortion special interest groups.
Among the first challenges to Roe were attempts to require that minors get the permission of their
parents before having an abortion. Pro-choice groups, often led by Planned
Parenthood, fought these common sense restrictions, but, beginning in 1979 with
Bellotti v. Baird, the Supreme Court
began to allow these laws that protected parental rights if they included an
exception that allowed pregnant minors to get approval from a judge instead of
their parents. This was affirmed in Planned
Parenthood of Kansas City v. Ashcroft (1983) and Planned Parenthood of S.E. Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992).
The original Roe v.
Wade ruling essentially prohibited restrictions on abortion in the first
trimester and required that laws covering the second trimester be focused on
the health of the mother, per Pew
Research. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in the decision that the state has
an interest in protecting “potential life” in the third trimester and could ban
abortions at that point as long as exceptions were made for the life and health
of the mother. These guidelines were later overhauled by Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.
Despite the original decision that allowed some regulation
of abortion, decades later pro-abortion activists were fighting restrictions on
partial-birth abortion, a barbaric procedure in which the abortionist dilated “the
woman's cervix, then pulling the fetus through it feet first until only the
head remained inside. Using scissors or another sharp instrument, the head was
then punctured, and the skull compressed, so it, too, could fit through the
dilated cervix.” The abortion community fought attempts to ban partial birth
abortion, technically called a “D&X,” dilation and extraction, despite the fact
that there seems to be no medical necessity for the procedure, which NPR
notes, was developed “to perform second-trimester abortions without an
overnight hospital stay, because local hospitals did not permit most abortions
after 18 weeks.”
As technology has improved, the pro-abortion community has
resisted attempts to require that abortion clinics inform women about the
choice for abortion. Several states
require that mothers be presented with an ultrasound image of their baby
before the make the choice for an abortion. Again, the advocates for women’s
rights fought to keep women from seeing the scientific evidence that the child
within them is a living human being.
The pro-choice community also fought to prevent health and
sanitary standards for outpatient surgery centers from being applied to abortion
clinics. In Whole Woman’s Health v.
Hellerstedt (2016), the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that required
that abortionists have admitting privileges at a local hospital and that
abortion clinics meet the same health and sanitary standards as an outpatient
surgical center.
The Texas law was passed after a woman died in Kermit Gosnell’s
Philadephia abortion clinic. Philadelphia’s NBC-10
reported that Karnamaya Mongar, 41, died after experiencing severe pain at the
clinic. It took an hour for an ambulance to arrive to take Mongar to the hospital
and firefighters had to cut bolts off the clinic’s emergency door to extricate
her. Gosnell was convicted of manslaughter in the case in addition to three
counts of murdering infants that were born alive. He was also accused of
allowing extremely unsanitary conditions in the clinic and hiring unqualified
workers who he then allowed to perform abortions unsupervised.
In about 30 years, I can’t recall a single instance where
pro-abortion groups voluntarily submitted to even the most reasonable of
abortion restrictions. Even the NRA has occasionally bowed to pressure for more
gun controls as it did earlier this year when President
Trump ordered bump stocks to be banned, but the abortion advocates seem to
have never given an inch. We can reasonably conclude that if the new laws
allowed unrestricted abortion access to victims of rape and incest that the
pro-abortion crowd would find something else to complain about.
The truth is that the debate about rape and incest
exceptions is a red herring. The Guttmacher
Institute found that only one percent of abortions were due to rape and
less than half a percent were due to incest. The vast majority of abortions are
elective procedures that are performed as a method of birth control. It is
these hundreds of thousands of abortions annually that the pro-abortion acitvists
are fighting to protect.
Rape and incest victims will not be without options under
the new laws. Heartbeat bills and even the Alabama law do not outlaw morning-after
pills. There are also charities that provide transportation for mothers to
areas where abortion is legal and clinics still operate. In Georgia, the law
specifically provides an exception
up to 20 weeks for women are willing to file a police report alleging rape or
incest.
The fight over abortion and protecting the lives of pre-born
humans is not over and won’t be for a long time, regardless of what courts
decide about the current crop of laws. There is little doubt, however, that
whatever laws are passed to limit the killing of babies, the pro-abortion
groups will be there to oppose them, whatever they are. For pro-choice groups,
it’s all about unrestricted access.
Originally published
on The
Resurgent
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