The powers that be, their sycophants and supporters, in the state of New York are celebrating. Their applause filled the legislative chamber. They lit up their monuments, including the World Trade Center, in honor of the legalization of . . . wait for it . . . abortion up to the very second of a baby's full-term birth. There is no longer any restriction on when an abortion can be done.
Yes, in the state of New York a baby can legally be destroyed in all those inhuman ways we've heard of, ---murdered---anytime, even just before signs indicate he or she is about to be born naturally. Incredibly, at full term, the adoption option isn't even part of the conversation.
Here is some history. As far as we have been able to learn, at the time of Roe v. Wade, when abortion was first legalized, it was only allowed in the first trimester. In 1992 the Supreme Court extended it to the end of the second trimester. Then, states began to nibble away even at that. But the very controversial idea of partial birth abortion, when birth is induced and the baby is brutally killed before it completely exists the birth canal, has been and is still forbidden.
We do not know how killing a full term infant is to be legally accomplished. There is certainly no humane way to kill a baby. We heard someone say the child is poisoned and then the mother waits a few days, after which the dead baby is taken or delivered. Doesn't that sound so much more dangerous for the mother than letting the baby be born alive and healthy? Also, the part of the New York law, which used to require a second doctor on hand to save the child's life if the abortion didn't work, is now repealed. Isn't that horrible? Many are assuming this means it is now pretty much legal to either let die or even purposely kill an infant that survives abortion. To know what this might look like we need only open our eyes to what that butcher Gosnell was convicted of doing to living, post-birth infants in Pennsylvania. Have you seen the movie, Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer, documenting his crimes? He was put in jail forever, but thanks to New York is now probably busy preparing his appeal.
This brutality can be done legally for any reason. Or none. Not only that, but non-doctors, that's health care "practitioners" who acquire some sort of state certification or authorization (however that is decided), are now permitted to perform abortions legally. Also, a full-term infant (40 weeks) still inside the womb, who is the victim of a homicide will no longer be considered a valuable human life cut short by crime as before (at least after 24 weeks gestation), but completely ignored by the law. And guess what else? This sets a precedent for the entire country to follow, a country that is continually showing in more and more ways how much it despises its own posterity, through its celebratory destruction of innocent humanity, through its casual and perverse and financial exploitation of human sexuality, through the increasing sexualization and endangerment of innocent children, and through the mockery and misconstruction of the two sexes and the procreative act.
FYI, in New York City, about one in every three pregnancies is ended by abortion. It has one of the highest rates of abortion in the country.
What a bunch of liars and hypocrites these New Yorkers are. They pretend it's all about the health of the mother. Not so. For one example, it's a fact that after 15 weeks gestation it is safer for the mother to carry the baby to term and give birth normally than to have an abortion. They pretend it's about the mother's mental or emotional health, but would-be mothers are now coming forward testifying of the lasting trauma and regret they experience from having an abortion.
Let's get real. These pro-abortion zealots know that abortion was first legalized, albeit very stealthily, with the imprimatur that it would be rare and safe, that it would only occur when really necessary (however that was to be defined; these days it is hardly ever really necessary), that it would only be allowed in the first trimester, and that only trained medical doctors would perform it. It was drilled into everyone's head that this would end dangerous and seedy back-alley abortions and so improve the health and lives of women. What a slippery slope it has all turned out to be! Not that we ever thought abortion on demand was ever right. We believe human beings in every stage are endowed with certain inalienable rights.
Honestly, everybody knows that sexual intercourse between normal reproductive-age opposite sex couples may result in the creation of a human embryo. Every decent and responsible person knows that when such people engage in male-female intercourse, they may make a baby. So nothing about abortion is about a woman having freedom over her own body. She has that when she engages in sex all right, but when conception occurs things change. Suddenly there is another unique human life involved, whom, if you merely leave alone up until the time of birth, will most likely be born healthy, be taken care of, and grow to adulthood and old age.
How our standards and morals have changed! There is a 1932 movie called Life Begins, starring Loretta Young. At the time it was made it was banned in some places because it was considered too raw or sensitive for public consumption. It's about several women in a maternity ward of a hospital awaiting the birth of their babies, all with different points of view about the impending event. Young's character is an inmate of the local prison (unfairly convicted of murder to life in prison) whose husband adores her, but who at the last moment must decide who to save, the mother or the baby. The father chooses his wife, but the doctors secretly let the condemned mother decide. She chooses the baby. Another woman, a showgirl, and married, feels no sense of motherhood, and wants to give her baby (it turns out to be twins) away. Another is joyfully adding to an already large family. Another is approaching motherhood in a purely scientific way, planning to have no human attachment with her infant. Still another's baby is destined not to survive birth. Each end up dealing with their own and others' birth situations in a natural and motherly way. Surprisingly for some, these mothers quite quickly soften and grow to appreciate the miracle of birth and cherish their babies. The hard, unfeeling women change into caring, nuturing, unselfish mothers. How sad that so many women today aren't even giving themselves that chance! Interesting how none of these outcomes in the film end in killing a baby, needlessly or otherwise. I imagine that in those days abortion was just too unthinkable and unspeakable to portray in a movie. Yes, our standards and morals have greatly changed---to our own great shame---and people need to know it.
Now we see that, even for no reason at all, pregnant women get to decide if they want their growing baby to live or die at any stage. That is not far from killing a baby once born, as Gosnel did, or even a toddler, a child. In tyrannical countries, and increasingly in America, human beings end up being valued not because they are of immeasurable spiritual worth created in the image of God with an immortal soul, but according to arbitrary decisions about factors such as size, ethnicity, sex, mental or physical characteristics, whether or not they are wanted, population control, and usefulness. For some time there have been leaders in America all for infanticide, including Margaret Sanger, the mother of legalized abortion, who was all about reducing, controlling, even exterminating, the black population. Yes, she was a huge racist all for genocide, at least in this form, the type of genocide that obliterates a whole race of people before they are big enough to defend themselves. Even today, percentage-wise, there are far more abortions of black babies in America (specifically including New York City) than of other ethnicities. In 2015, nationwide, 31 % of pregnancies of black women ended in abortion, while 11 % of pregnancies of white women ended in abortion. That's three times as many. And yet this hideous racial component, then and now inherent in the practice of legalized abortion, is swept under the rug by the pro-abortion mob. Yes New York, the ugly truth is that this whole abortion issue is highly racist at its core. Funny how those endlessly accusing others of racism these days are actually the real racists. Violent, deadly racists.
What if the government decided who could have babies and who couldn't, or whose babies could live and whose couldn't for whatever reason, or for no reason at all (mandatory abortion)? This sort of thing happened in Nazi Germany and is actually the case in China today (although the laws have been relaxed a tiny bit since 2013 because the birth rate fell too low, especially for females). It could conceivably happen anywhere. There is a Netflix series The Man in the High Castle, about America in WW II contrarily having been defeated by the Nazis and Japan, in which a neo-Nazi father in 1962 is supposed to immediately euthanize his golden teenage son because he has been diagnosed to have a debilitating genetic disease in its early stage. In this world no defective person is allowed to live. Isn't this New York law to allow anybody to arbitrarily kill unborn babies a definite step toward the government assuming that power at any stage of any person's life? If God's standard is no longer upheld, if capricious governments decide to make up their own rules about the value or worthlessness of this or that human life, why not?
No, it's not about a woman's rights. That's a distraction from the whole truth, the truth that rights come with adult responsibility and there is supposed to be a standard upheld for right behavior. Although racist at its core, and used to exploit unfortunate people and make money, the whole thing has also publicly become about removing the corresponding reproductive responsibility from the act of sex. In other words, people want people to be able to sex around all they want without any consequences. They want to all but eradicate the reproductive purpose of sex. But there is something that seems to have inevitably come along with that. Because people want to be irresponsible, or perhaps because people want to thumb their noses at traditional morality and/or God, or simply because anarchy sets the stage for power grabbing, we see people not only taking delight in the pleasures of thoughtless sex, but also delighting in the despising and destroying of human posterity. Apparently this is the inevitable outcome.
That second part---the delight in despising and destroying of human life---was never part of Roe v. Wade back in 1973. Back then there was no applauding and celebrating and lighting up the killing off of any fertilized embryo, much less pre-born babies perfectly viable or fully ready-to-be born. Like Glenn Beck said, can you imagine an animal control officer or vet, for example, celebrating, applauding, and lighting up the sky about the euthanizing of an animal or the destroying of its young at any stage? How psychotic does that sound? It's just sick! And yet, in the state of New York, this is going on in reference to numberless human beings---the most innocent of all humanity, the pre-born, what every one of us were at one time. There is no doubt that we are living among a certain form of psychopathic barbarians.
And as Herman Melville wrote, "I doubt it's ignorance that motives their actions." There is no excuse for ignorance as to the reproductive element of human sexual relations in this day and age. There is no excuse as to denying the humanity and viability of human life in the womb anymore, what with technology that makes possible detailed ultrasounds in increasing dimensions, in vitro surgery, the saving and care of even extremely premature infants, not to mention the truth exposed about the pain unborn babies experience and the brutality of all methods of abortion, or the sale of aborted babies' body parts being perpetrated. These days everyone knows that a human being is human at every stage. (How can they say the aborted baby isn't human when they turn around and sell its human body parts?)These days everyone knows something about the extremely savage and violent methods that are employed in destroying human life within a mother's womb. In advanced gestation cases the pulled-apart human pieces have to be puzzled together to make sure the entire body has been extracted! How can anyone say this is not murder, especially when the baby was at a stage to survive outside the womb? (I think it is a form of murder at any stage and for any reason, by the way.)
Inconveniently for the pro-abortion mob, premature babies are surviving at earlier and earlier stages of gestation. I was there when our triplet grandchildren were born in 2009 at 30 weeks---that's 6 1/2 months gestation, 2 1/2 months early. I had carried twins full term (both were over 7 pounds) so I never expected that my daughter (one of the twins) would go into labor so early, especially when she was on bed rest in the hospital being given all sorts of prenatal, labor-checking care. The night of their birth, in my shock and gratitude I thanked the nurses for saving the babies' lives. They responded casually, "Oh, we didn't do that. They are fine, just feeders and growers." And yet they were so small I almost fainted when I first saw them, their little heads the size of oranges. They were perfectly formed, each just under 3 pounds. Today they are healthy normal nine-year-olds. Another baby was there at the hospital at the same time as the triplets who was born at 21 weeks and survived, cherished at every stage by her family. Decades ago, when I was a journalist, I did a story on the smallest baby ever born alive at the University of Utah. She was a pound and a half, the weight of a can of soda pop. A wedding ring fit on her thigh. Much to the joy of those who loved and cared for her, she thrived.
This same daughter with the triplets called me a few months ago almost hysterical with grief. I knew that for weeks she had been helping a co-worker with her early unwanted pregnancy, spending many hours trying to convince her not to have an abortion, explaining that she would regret it someday for all sorts of reasons (as many women now do). My daughter even said she would take the baby for her own. That morning the co-worker had arrived at work telling my daughter she had begun the process of termination, admitting that she knew it was selfish. She said she thought my daughter would not want to be friends anymore, but of course that didn't happen. My daughter was only struck with this girl's careless short-sightedness, with a sense of useless waste, and with a feeling of deep sorrow.
My question is: Where are the churches? Where are the ecclesiastical leaders speaking out ceaselessly against this most undeniable, inhumanity to man? They should be at the forefront, decrying this wickedness, this unnatural murderous barbarism directed at the most vulnerable of human beings. And if they aren't taking a stand against it anymore, are they for it?
We should weep at the brutal Nazi-esque inhumanity showcased by this new law in New York. We should weep at the callousness, the irresponsibility, the selfishness, and the hell, now and forever, awaiting the unrepentant people who do such deeds and the unrepentant people who support them. We should weep for the lost life, and for our children and grandchildren having to make their way in such an unfeeling, immoral, and wicked world, where evil is celebrated as good, and good is portrayed as evil.
Note 1/27/19: When we were at Utah's March for Life on January 26 we heard that the Catholic Church is pushing back on New York's Gov. Cuomo (who is Catholic) about this development.
Note 1/30/19: Today a Virginia legislator proposed the same sort of bill, which included the legalizing of killing a baby after birth, which Virginia's governor says he is fine with. Even though the bill was defeated in committee, the juggernaut has begun.
Note 2/3/19: We have been hearing that it is not uncommon across the United States in abortion clinics for babies born alive to be put aside and left to die.We have also been hearing that several states have been allowing the practice of late-term abortion for many years. Perhaps what is new about the above development is the specific legalization and public celebration in no uncertain terms of full-term abortion, which there is never any need for and which is dangerous for the mother, and what people are calling infanticide, when a baby meant to be killed is born alive and neglected to death or killed in some other way post birth.
Note 2/4/19: According to a 2013 CA study cited by Glenn Beck, the great majority of women seeking late term abortions do so for reasons having nothing to do with their health, such as she didn't know she was pregnant, she couldn't make up her mind if she wanted the baby, she needed insurance coverage, there were domestic issues, etc.
Note 2/26/19 We have changed the title of this post from The New York Baby Killers to The Nation's Baby Killers. This is because yesterday the U.S Senate voted on a bill that would require doctors to try to save babies born alive after abortion attempts,which bill was defeated 53 to 44. This means that our governing representatives have decided for us all that live newborn babies should be left to die, which is the same as killing them because newborn infants are completely helpless. And yet a mother who dumps her newborn in a dumpster or neglects her baby until it is sick or dead would definitely be arrested! This makes no sense. Unwanted human beings born under the watch of an abortion provider have no rights, but those born somewhere else or taken home do? Or not? These days who knows? But we do know this. Right now, incredibly, the federal law is damnably silent on what to do with babies born alive who were intended to be born dead. It appears it is left up to state laws, and we know where that has gone: if people try to kill a baby before it is born in a designated facility, they are justified in killing it after it is born in that facility. This is obviously not about women's health. It appears it is just about getting rid of the victim/witness of attempted murder.
Very inconsistent, very wicked, and very scary.