Editor’s note. This editorial appeared on page 2 of the April online edition of National Right to Life News. Since it was published, Oklahoma became the second state to enact the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act. You can read this post, and all stories from the 40-page April edition, at http://nrlc.org///uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsApril2015.pdf. Please share using your social media contacts.
Each state legislative session is different for obvious reasons–turnover, whether an election year or not, how much was accomplished previously–and not so obvious reasons. But for Kansans, and by extension, the entire Movement, the current session will forever be etched in their minds. It was (in that oft-times overused but in this instance justified word) “historic.”
Tuesday morning pro-life Gov. Sam Brownback happily fulfilled a promise. He signed into law SB95, the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act.
Brownback said, “This is a horrific procedure and we are pleased to ban it in Kansas and we hope it will be banned nationally.”
According to Kansans for Life, to commemorate this ground-breaking and first-in-the-nation measure, Gov. Brownback will travel across Kansas for ceremonial signings of the bill on April 28.
Let’s put SB95 in context.
There are many ways to open the public’s eye, which, when you come down to it, is a precursor to opening their hearts. With ultrasounds, for example, it’s as if the curtain shielding the littlest Americans from our sight has been lifted. Our fellow human beings were there all the time. We just hadn’t “seen” them.
Nonetheless, we are wise enough to know that George Orwell’s insight still applies:“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
With first partial-birth abortion and now Dismemberment abortions, it is a very different shock of recognition. It’s one thing to be blind to the unborn child’s presence and then have the veil lifted. It is quite another to learn that we kill vulnerable unborn babies with “techniques” that border on the psychotic.
Consider the now banned partial-birth abortion technique. Could anyone outside the precincts of the abortion industry even imagine delivering a live unborn child feet-first except for her head and then holding the baby in that position while the abortionist punctured her skull — killing the child — and then suctioning out her brains?
No wonder legislators in Kansas and Oklahoma, including even some who regularly parrot the abortion lobby’s propaganda, chose not to participate in the debate over Dismemberment abortions. Those that did (surprise, surprise) talked about everything under the sun except what happens and to whom.
And who can blame them? Except for the genuine sickies in the abortion trade, who would be comfortable talking about ripping tiny legs off of little torsos? Who wouldn’t dread highlighting that the baby’s head is crushed in a Dismemberment abortion? Who would want to be the Paul Revere of death who alerts the world that these helpless babies bleed to death?
So when you read their gibberish, their misinformation and disinformation, you can’t help but be reminded of a second quote from Orwell, among his most famous and most important: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Or, we could add, pretend ignorance
Let’s talk about just a couple of examples.
“We’ve never seen this language before,” Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues associate for the Guttmacher Institute, told the AP’s Brad Cooper. “It’s not medical language, so it’s a little bit difficult to figure out what the language would do.”
Actually it’s not all at difficult to figure out what abortionists cannot do. Under the bill, abortions are banned that “dismember” a living unborn child…one piece at a time…through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments.
What else? The standard pro-abortion pot-calling-the-kettle-black nonsense.
Take, for instance, Caitlin Borgmann, former state strategies coordinator for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, who told Cooper, “It’s meant to try to create an inflammatory description that people are going to read and then support the bill because their instinct is that this sounds terrible.”
Others of her ilk, such as Laura McQuade, the president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, like “sensational” and “graphic,” as if somehow that discredits what supporters of the ban are saying, as if pro-abortionists never use “sensational” language in slurring pro-lifers and impugning our motives at every turn.
But back to the point: which characterization–pro-lifers’ or pro-choicers’– corresponds more closely to reality? Which is buried in obscurities and which is simply telling the unvarnished truth?
In a dismemberment abortion, the body of the current resident of the womb is literally (not figuratively) dismembered, limb-by-limb.
Don’t want to take my word for it? Here’s Supreme Court Justice Antony Kennedy, quoting from the testimony of abortionist LeRoy Carhart:
“As described by Dr. Carhart, the D&E procedure requires the abortionist to use instruments to grasp a portion (such as a foot or hand) of a developed and living fetus and drag the grasped portion out of the uterus into the vagina. Dr. Carhart uses the traction created by the opening between the uterus and vagina to dismember the fetus, tearing the grasped portion away from the remainder of the body…. [until the unborn baby] bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb… In Dr. Carhart’s words, the abortionist is left with ‘a tray full of pieces.’”
We call that “brutal.”
How do pro-abortionists describe what takes place?
To Tara Culp-Ressler, a dismemberment abortion “involves dilating the cervix and using surgical instruments to remove the fetal and placental tissue.”
That’s right, “fetal and placental tissue.”
To return to Borgmann’s lament, “It’s meant to try to create an inflammatory description that people are going to read and then support the bill because their instinct is that this sounds terrible.”
No, it isn’t. The language of the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act simply tells it like it is—in all its surrealistic brutality–not the way pro-abortionists would like it disguised.
Like the proverbial blind squirrel who finds a nut, McQuade did stumble across a truth. “It’s not just a legal campaign, it’s a campaign in the court of public opinion.”
It is indeed. And we are winning!
And that will qualify, under anyone’s definition, as historic.