“’Person,’ when referring to the victim of a homicide, means a human being who has been born and is alive.”
— New York abortion bill signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, Tuesday, January 22, 2019
“This court has heretofore decided that the status or condition of a person of African descent depended on the laws of the State in which he resided.” — Dred Scott v. Sandford, U.S. Supreme Court, Friday, March 6, 1857
High school juniors in America learn that Dred Scott was the worst decision the U.S. Supreme Court ever made, because it defined slaves as non-citizens without federal rights.
But Roger Taney, the chief justice at the time and author of the decision, at least had the fig leaf of having to interpret the federal constitution. (However badly he did it.)
New York’s new all-nine-months abortion law says exactly what its supporters want it to say.
What is that?
A health care practitioner licensed, certified, or authorized …
Meaning: Not even necessarily a medical doctor
may perform an abortion when, according to the practitioner’s reasonable and good faith professional judgement based on the facts of the patient’s case:
Meaning: for any reason the abortionist can justify
The patient is within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of pregnancy …
or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health
Meaning: any time up until birth for any reason at all, since unmeasurable psychological health counts … or, in non-words (at 36 weeks):
All of which makes you wonder why the life can’t be ended here:
I mean, what’s so sacred about birth?
Isn’t all we’re talking about a matter of timing?
It is, actually. From conception to 12 weeks to 24 weeks to 36 weeks to post-umbilical-cord: The major difference in termination procedures is the amount of pain the victim feels. But the end result is the same: death.
Put another way: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo used to be an executioner. Now he’s a torturer and an executioner.
Andrew Cuomo is also John Brown without the virtue.
In 1859 John Brown used hard-to-justify methods to try to wake up America to an ugly truth about the way we were treating black inhabitants. In 2019 Andrew Cuomo is waking up America to an ugly truth about the way we treat babies — yet not by taking up their cause, but by trying to help more people kill more of them in gruesome ways.
How gruesome? Well, let’s not dwell on the horrors of 36 weeks or 24 weeks.
“I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact.”
“Now dead” means “was alive.” What was alive? A human being, of course – at an early stage of development. What could not have progressed into any stage of development as either a sperm cell or an egg cell became a human being when the two came together to form a zygote, and 17 weeks later ended up looking something like this:
If you are finding this version of life-begins-at-conception tiresome, it is because you already know it’s true. And that’s so whether you support ending abortion or not. Everyone knows it’s true. Because it’s obvious.
The only question is whether it matters.
As America approached the Civil War in the late 1850s, a gulf widened. People who had always frowned on slavery found it harder to justify allowing it. People who had always practiced slavery found it harder to think rationally about it.
Philosophical discussions of previous decades that allowed for reasonable assumptions and logical inferences dried up. People who had once argued that slavery was a necessary evil now tossed “evil” and played up “necessary.”
This is what Andrew Cuomo’s abortion bill does. Lighting up pink the spire of Manhattan’s One World Trade Center to celebrate his abortion bill is also necessary. Celebration must be asserted, because it can’t be defended.
Abortion is the worst disaster that has ever befallen America. It’s worse than slavery, worse than King George III, worse than the Civil War, worse than World War I, worse than World War II, Korea, Vietnam, September 11th.
Worse even than that, though, is it’s getting worse.
New York’s new abortion law is the worst law ever approved by a state legislature. And it’s not an isolated incident. Surely there are some – like, say, in Massachusetts – gazing on it admiringly, hoping to reproduce it.
This is why well-meaning people who see abortion as a state issue and the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court as the natural conclusion of the national discussion are mistaken.
Abortion is not a local matter. Abortion is not different in Nebraska as opposed to New York. It’s the same act, with the same result. It doesn’t kill in Nebraska where people don’t like it, but not kill in New York where a lot of people do. Everywhere it is practiced, death reigns.
It is therefore as unacceptable in New York as it is in Nebraska.
Abraham Lincoln argued in his famous “House Divided” speech in 1858 that the country could not endure “half slave” and “half free”:
“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.”
The same is true of abortion. It will not rest until it is settled. It must be settled – nationwide. Removing the legal impediment of Roe v. Wade is necessary to restore hope for unborn children and sanity to constitutional law. That should happen as soon as possible. But it’s not enough.
America needs a Human Life Amendment to the United States Constitution that protects the most fundamental right any of us has.
Crazy, you say. Like many, perhaps you think abortion is so entrenched and so divisive that it is impossible to eradicate it throughout the country. That surmise is understandable.
But what if we are living in 1858? What if Andrew Cuomo’s abortion bill is Dred Scott — the last bit of effrontery of the most shameless movement yet known to America?
What if we are in an ugly period about to get uglier, but that if we stay the course we will rid the land of this scourge?
I do not mean a civil war like the one we had in the 1860s. We should not have a civil war over abortion or anything else. We should not kill anybody or harm anybody. That’s what abortionists do, and we should not act like them. War results in killing and death, and often causes problems worse than the ones it tries to solve.
But should we insist on victory and press on for it, even through divisiveness? Yes.
The current divisions in our society are not only sad, they are necessary – because they are not only real, they are about things that matter.
When it comes to abortion, the only way to end the division is to resolve it. We must continue until we do.
