PrintMarch 3, 2010
How a Nebraska Bill May Pivot the Abortion Debate
The abortion debate may get an interesting twist soon. The Nebraska Legislature is considering a bill to ban abortions performed twenty weeks into a woman's pregnancy. Nebraska has a nonpartisan, unicameral legislature, so many of the shenanigans which can cause legislative bills to fall into a maelstrom of confusion are absent there. This is not a "partisan" issue, and no conference committee reports can swallow the bill and then regurgitate it as unrecognizable vomit.
Moreover, Legislative Bill 1103 will get a hearing: Its sponsor is Mike Flood, Speaker of Nebraska's legislature.
Six states (Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Minnesota, Georgia, and Oregon) already have laws that require that a pregnant mother, before she has an abortion, be advised that the procedure could cause pain to the unborn child. It is hard for leftists to object to such statutes. Requiring that the patient be informed of the consequences of a medial procedure has long been considered part of the progressive agenda.
Mary Balch, Legislative Director of the National Right to Life Committee, reports that if Nebraska passes this bill into law, it would be the first state in the union to do so. But if a Nebraska law with these provisions passes constitutional muster, Nebraska's proposal will certainly be enacted in other states.
Does an unborn child feel pain when it is killed? Medical technology now allows surgical procedures to be performed on very small unborn children. This advance in medicine alone takes away many of the arguments for abortions -- more and more at-risk unborn babies can enter the world healthy. But more to the point of fetal pain, when surgeons perform this sort of procedure on babies in the womb, anesthesia is administered. Why do that unless the unborn baby can feel pain?
The Nebraska bill carefully accounts for those sorts of concerns that all decent people have always had about abortion: Might the mother die if the child is born? Could a live birth cause permanent damage to the mother's health? (Legislative Bill 1103, though, makes a point of requiring physical and not "psychic" harm to the mother.) Amendments may include those other tricky areas -- children born of rape or incest.
This sort of legislation, though, throws the left into a very awkward position. Animals are getting more and more legal rights. Cruelty to animals is not only illegal, but television shows highlight law enforcement officers dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of animal cruelty. What is the argument against giving this protection to unborn children?
The same people in America who championed laws against cruelty to animals also were at the forefront of laws against cruelty to children. A social worker, frustrated by an inability to stop the maltreatment of a young girl beaten daily, was urged on by her niece, who told her: "You are so troubled by that abused child, why not go to Mr. Bergh? She is a little animal, surely." Henry Bergh, who fought for a law in New York against cruelty to animals, listened and gained custody of the little girl.
Are unborn children, at least to leftists, entitled to the same protection as animals? Or are these unborn children, as so many of us fear the left believes, "life unworthy of life," as the Nazis described Jews, Gypsies, and physically or mentally handicapped people?
And if, in the sensitive conscience of leftism, torture is always wrong -- whether it is against a terrorist about to commit ghastly mayhem in our cities or whether it involves the precise, allowed methods to painlessly execute a monster whose crimes earned him a death sentence from a sickened jury -- then why is torture not wrong against unborn children? Roe v. Wade created a "penumbra" (i.e., a judicially created fancy) out of the Ninth Amendment's putative "right to privacy." What about the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment? Does this apply to unborn children as much as it applies to vicious terrorists and ghastly criminals?
In 1972, one year before his support of Roe v. Wade, Justice Douglass pondered in an environmental case, "Do trees have standing?" In other words, does this inanimate form of plant life have legal rights that the state or some individual can raise for protection against harm? This leftist cipher, however, never seems to have pondered whether "viable fetal mass" -- babies in the womb -- have standing as well.
It is an ugly world in which to protect babies from torture and slaughter, we must remind the dim bulbs of leftism that they would willingly break the law to prevent seal cubs from being killed or other animals from being abused, but the logic supporting recreational prenatal infanticide vanished long ago. Today it is simply a ritualistic requirement to assert "a woman's right to choose" -- which, of course, ends at birth...at least for now.
The Nebraska bill will put fans of unrestricted abortion right where they belong -- supporting all sorts of evil, as long as it is committed out of sight. The same folks who would bind our grandchildren into chattel slavery for life to keep voters today from trivial sacrifices in entitlements and who ignore the most savage torments inflicted behind barbed wire in Marxist regimes while bemoaning the mildest limitations on freedom in America will go on defending the mass slaughter of unborn babies -- until confronted with the ugly facts of what these people are sanctioning.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
