I’m writing in response to “Sexual justice a civil rights issue, regardless of politics, gender, sexual orientation,” by Joey Gamble. Mr. Gamble expressed his opposition to a Texas bill that would ban abortion after a developing human fetus has reached 20 weeks gestation. At 20 weeks old, pain receptors are present throughout an unborn child’s entire body. The fact that unborn children can feel excruciating pain as they are dismembered during late-term abortions was the basis for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that Congress recently passed.
Fetal pain is not the only issue that the Texas bill addresses. The push to regulate abortion facilities is a direct reaction to the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, whose squalid “clinic” conditions went unnoticed by the Philadelphia Department of Public Health for 17 years – the testimony of two Delaware Planned Parenthood nurses who blew the whistle on their employer for performing “meat-market style, assembly-line abortions” and the deaths of Tonya Reaves and Jennifer Morbelli, the latter of whom was 33 weeks pregnant when an elective late-term abortion killed her and her daughter.
Mr. Gamble wrote, “SB5 also places a heavy burden on abortion providers to be licensed as ‘ambulatory surgery centers,’ a designation afforded to health care facilities that provide only out-patient surgical procedures such as colonoscopies and knee replacements.” It’s worth noting that abortions performed later in pregnancy are surgical. Medication abortions – “the abortion pill” – are typically only administered to mothers who are nine weeks pregnant or less. Classifying abortion facilities as ambulatory surgical centers means that they must have wider hallways so that gurneys can be wheeled down them in the event that a botched abortion and means a woman needs to be taken to the hospital immediately.
Wider hallways and doors through which a gurney could be pushed certainly would’ve helped Birmingham abortion facility New Woman All Women Jan. 21, 2012, when it sent three abortion patients to the hospital. One of these patients had to be hand-lifted down stairs into a trash-filled alley. The Alabama Department of Public Health subsequently issued a 76-page deficiency report about the abortion business.
The widespread abuses of the abortion industry show that Gosnell is not alone. The abortion lobby and its allies like Mr. Gamble have no interest in laws holding abortion facilities to necessary medical standards, even though such standards would provide greater protection for women undergoing abortions. Supporting “women’s health” is not synonymous with actively fighting laws that would’ve stopped Gosnell. Such laws would stop abortionists like Douglas Karpen of Texas, whose employees just came forward contending that Karpen regularly commits infanticide by twisting off the heads of babies born alive following failed abortions.
The majority of Americans oppose late-term abortion. In January, Gallup found that 80 percent of Americans think that third-trimester abortions should be illegal and 64 percent think that second-trimester abortions should be illegal. America’s abortion laws are some of the loosest in the world, along with North Korea, China and Canada. Even liberal European countries restrict abortion after 12 weeks.
Mr. Gamble wrote that the writers of SB5 “view pregnant women – regardless of the way in which they were impregnated – not as human beings with all the civil rights associated with that status, but as mere shells carrying a human being inside them.” Women’s rights are important; of course women are more than “mere shells.” However, we can’t forget the human rights of the unborn children – or fetuses, if you prefer that term, which is Latin for “little one” or “offspring” – who are temporarily housed in their mothers’ wombs for nine months.
The most astounding part of Mr. Gamble’s piece was his assertion, “If you are not actively fighting for sexual justice in this country, then you are complicit in the systematic attempt to declare an entire group of human beings as less than human.” Mr. Gamble, if you’re not actively fighting for justice for all people – including unborn children – then you are complicit in the systematic attempt to declare an entire group of human beings less than human. Since you oppose protecting babies five months from conception, at what point should we grant them human rights? At nine months? The day before birth? Right after birth, as if eight inches down the birth canal magically transforms a “clump of cells” into a human being worthy of rights?
It’s highly insulting to encourage women to deny the biological realities of motherhood or tell us that we have a right to murder our children in the name of “civil rights.”
Mr. Gamble’s claim that “sexual justice is at the very core of who we are as a nation” is ludicrous. Every human being’s right to life is at the very core of who we are as a nation.
Claire Chretien is the President of Bama Students for Life.
