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NRL News
Fourteen
Years of Devotion and Dedication
“This
isn’t really an abortion issue,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
D-San Francisco, as she walked the Capitol on Friday. “That is what
really saddens me about what the justices said” [in Gonzales v.
Carhart, the decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act]. “Not five feet away, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum turned to face the opposition and in a high, pleading voice cried out, ‘Where do we draw the line? Some people have likened this procedure to an appendectomy. That’s not an appendix,’ he shouted, pointing to a drawing of a fetus. ‘That is not a blob of tissue. It is a baby. It’s a baby.’ “And then, impossibly, in an already hushed gallery, in one of those moments when the floor of the Senate looks like a stage set, with its rich wooden desks somehow too small for the matters at hand, the cry of a baby pierced the room, echoing across the chamber from an outside hallway.
“No one
mentioned the cry, but for a few seconds no one spoke at all.” No sooner had I written the first two paragraphs than a colleague forwarded me the transcript of remarks made by former President Bill Clinton on the Larry King show. In their breathtaking cynicism and dishonesty, they reminded me—as if I needed any reminder—of what an amazingly nimble politician Clinton remains and how he was able to emerge from two terms (which included being impeached) with high approval ratings. Clinton told the always gullible King that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was not a “pro-life decision.” Why? Because Clinton had vetoed it twice, and for the best of reasons (of course). Clinton reminded King that on one occasion when he vetoed the bill, he’d had three women alongside him for whom having a partial-birth abortion was a “medical necessity” without which they might compromise their chances to bear future children. “And they told me that they would otherwise never want to use this procedure, that no one would want to do this unless there was some medical necessity for it,” Clinton said. Fourteen years since we ran our first NRL News stories about partial-birth abortion; twelve years since the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was first introduced; probably a million words of clarification, debunking, excruciatingly detailed documentation, the confessions of abortionists who themselves performed partial-birth abortions, and two Supreme Court decisions later, and still the lies persist. Just let me say it succinctly, or, to be more accurate, to borrow from the massive compilation of data performed by the NRLC Legislative Office to whom not just the pro-life community but all Americans are indebted. Partial-birth abortions (which Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart described as “intact D&E”) are almost always performed on healthy, unborn babies 20–24 weeks old. These children are alive when the abortionist begins his brutal assault. These babies are capable of experiencing pain beyond anything we could possible imagine. The child is mostly delivered before the abortionist punctures the base of her skull with sharp instruments. The kids are alive when the abortionist begins the soul-chilling “procedure”—and up until the moment when the scissors or hollow metal rod is thrust deeply into the skull. If there is any small chance that a baby is still alive after that trauma, she won’t be after her brains are vacuumed out. Mark this down: a premature human is deliberately pulled to within just a few inches of being a live-born person, medically and legally, even under the law of Roe v. Wade. That’s the gruesome reality that not even Slick Willie’s distortions and omissions can erase. There are many elected officials who were instrumental in paving the way for passage, both when the law was vetoed by Clinton, and then later when it passed yet again and signed by pro-life President George W. Bush. Many organizations were relentlessly in their determination. God bless them all. But you should know—all of you who have so faithfully supported National Right to Life with your gifts and your prayers—that there would be no Gonzales v. Carhart were it not for NRLC. It took 14 years of persistence and unswerving determination, but we won! You should be proud of NRLC and what we were able to do, thanks to you! The public now knows that the abortionist who used the partial-birth abortion “technique” attacked a real, live human being. His victim suffers incalculably before she is brutally killed in a manner that makes the viciousness of snuff films pale by comparison. Putting an end to partial-birth abortions is but one step, I grant you. But in the years to come historians will write that this “small” victory was a decisive first-step. I have striven for years to find an apt comparison. Thanks to Chuck Colson, a staunch pro-lifer, I have it. In a Breakpoint commentary, Colson likened what happened with the April 18 decision to the 20+ year crusade of William Wilberforce. He is a hero to all pro-lifers, a model of what it takes to defeat a deeply-entrenched evil, protected by the Establishment. In Wilberforce’s case, it was the British slave trade. Colson reminded his listeners that if you looked at the initial victory Wilberforce won in 1788, you could say it didn’t challenge the legitimacy of slavery at its core. And it didn’t! It “restricted the number of slaves that a ship could be allowed to carry based on the ship’s tonnage.” But it was a victory nonetheless because “it proved that the slave industry was vulnerable.” Colson correctly calls this a “small” victory, in the short term, but it proved to be a decisive victory, in the long term. “[A]fter nearly two decades of hard work, in 1807, the House of Commons voted by an overwhelming majority to abolish the slave trade.” Why had Parliament accepted even this small limitation? Because even those most invested in treating human beings like cattle slunk back when reminded how many kidnapped Africans had been shoehorned into an impossibly small, unbelievably dank and unsanitary space. I remember something like it was yesterday from an intellectual history of the United States class I took in the 1960s. Our professor explained how the Puritans banned bear-baiting but not primarily for the reason you might think: cruelty to the animals. It was banned rather because of how the Puritans had come to understand that it coarsened and degraded the men who indulged in this “sport.” My head snapped back when Prof. Rutland made that observation, and the memory was seared into my brain forever. Snuffing out the lives of helpless unborn babies should be stopped first and foremost because it is a gross miscarriage of justice, a noxious affront to the core values that have made it inevitable that a nation which was once a rudimentary democracy would extend the protection of the law to all Americans. But this barbaric practice should be ended also because of the enormous spiritual damage it does to all of us, whether we are directly involved, several times removed, or not, seemingly, involved at all. We can no longer avert our gaze. With Gonzales v. Carhart, none of us can ever again say, “I didn’t know.” |