… a risky assumption to begin with.
And brings us to the group Abolish Human Abortion, which, like Planned Parenthood, is opposing the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
Here’s AHA’s reasoning. Click to enlarge…
I have little patience for this debate. Incremental legislation is very real to me, since I physically held an abortion victim who AHA would casually shrug off in the morally superior position it fancies itself to take by opposing it.
And, as I’ve written before, there is actually no such thing as pure, unadulterated, non-incremental legislation. A state personhood initiative leaves out preborn babies marked for death in 49 other states, more than any rape exception does. Even a personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution ignores all vulnerable preborn babies in the rest of the world.
Whatever, let’s analyze AHA’s rationale, as outlined in the above graphic, for opposing the 20-wk abortion ban.
I asked several pro-life leaders for comment.
Seth Drayer of Created Equal:
The most glaring problem is not a new one - the language of “allowing” some to be killed while preferring others. To illustrate, conductors on the Underground Railroad didn’t bring every slave to freedom. Does that mean those who perished under the whip of slavery did so with the permission or blessing of the conductors? Certainly not. They weren’t allowing other Blacks to be enslaved. They just didn’t have the means to save them all.
Similarly, they paint incrementalists as looking at the pool of preborn children and saving some while knowingly permitting the killing of others. That is disingenuous.
To correct their analogy, the proposed bill is more akin to driving that bus through a city where blacks are being lynched, opening the doors, and cramming as many as possible into the bus. Now, there are limitations. The bus can’t fit everyone in. So, yes, some will get left behind. But it’s not because you didn’t want to save them. It’s because there are limitations to your bus.
But you can fill your bus with as many of the victims as possible or pontificate on the sidelines of how it must be wrong until you can save them all. I choose the former.
Troy Newman of Operation Rescue:
Roe and Doe put every child under a death sentence, and the courts have upheld the murder. Therefore, ALL we can do is eat away at the law and save as many as we can. We do not prefer one baby to be killed over another one.
I like the Nazi analogy. All Jews were slated for death, but people did what they could to save as many as they could.
Exactly. To claim a pro-life incremental law marks those not covered in it for death is fraudulent. Every U.S. preborn baby is already, quite literally, on the chopping block.
An even more fitting example during the Nazi era would be Irena Sendler, who saved what children she could from death in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Eric Scheidler of Pro-Life Action League:
Another analogy to the era of slavery would be to fugitive slave laws in some northern states that sought to provide some legal protection of escaped slaves, or to laws banning slavery in a particular state (like Illinois, most famously, in the Dred Scott case).
These states could do nothing to end slavery (even for slaves residing in their states with masters from slave states, as SCOTUS ruled in Dred Scott), so they did what they could to diminish its impact.
The Dred Scott example is interesting in light of AHA’s “Remember Dred, Abolish Roe” mantra. They call Dred Scott a horrible decision (as it was), but the Illinois law Scott was seeking to be protected by (which as I understand it said masters forfeited their ownership of slaves by living in Illinois) is one they would have denounced as “compromise,” according to the logic they apply to pro-life laws today.
When we find ourselves on the same side as our enemy, we have to ask: Has the enemy converted, or have I?
In this case pro-aborts have certainly not converted. They are fighting for the continued freedom to murder preborn babies 20 weeks and older.
So is AHA.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.