Times Examiner Facebook Logo

Saturday, October 12, 2024 - 10:20 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

For the men and women milling about the Senate floor, it was a surreal moment. They'd been back in session barely two hours -- the first time, many will point out, since Vladimir Putin unleashed his war against the West. But instead of joining the rest of the world in racing to stop the threat against Europe, Democrats had other priorities: the spilling of innocent blood here at home. For the president's party, the timing of their unlimited abortion bill vote will be another thing Americans won't forget this November. It was a disturbing snapshot of the Left's leadership team, who made one of the first orders of business after Russia invaded Ukraine advancing their own war on the unborn.

Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kans.), who's delivered more than 5,000 babies in his Kansas practice, couldn't talk about it without getting emotional. "I can't believe it myself, but at a time when Vladimir Putin is murdering Ukrainians, my Democrat colleagues want to murder more unborn Americans for any reason up until the baby takes its first breath. Can you imagine that -- up until the baby takes its first breath? ... It's just unthinkable. You know, I just walked off the Senate floor, and it's just so emotional right now. I can hardly even... I just communicate how upset we are about this."

Fortunately for him, the states, and millions of unborn children, the Democrats' outrageous maneuver failed. And, more importantly, we can only hope it has devastating consequences for Joe Biden's party. By forcing their members to take a difficult vote like this -- on a truly fringe bill that would have legalized unlimited, taxpayer-funded abortion right until the moment of birth -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) aren't just dealing with bad optics. They'll also be managing the fallout for putting their most vulnerable incumbents on the spot for an extreme measure most Americans don't support and they knew wouldn't pass.

It was a high-stakes gamble that revealed a lot about the majority party, including a) how beholden they are to their radical base; b) how little they care about representing true voter sentiment on abortion (or any issue); c) what an unconvincing lie Biden's "moderate" candidacy was; and, d) the number of senators and congressmen they're willing to sacrifice on the altar of NARAL and Planned Parenthood.

As Marshall points out, this bill -- the so-called Women's Health Protection Act -- goes "way beyond" Roe v. Wade. Frankly, he said, it's "way, way beyond" anything we "could have ever dreamed up." Apart from giving the green light to free abortions on demand for any reason right up to the moment of birth, it also brings the hammer down on rights of conscience, abortion safety, and common medical sense. A faith-based hospital would be sued if they didn't do abortions, he explained. "A person like myself -- a pro-lifer -- would have had to quit medical school over this issue." So would a lot of medical and nursing students today if they knew they'd be forced to participate in abortion.

"This law gets rid of informed consent and parental consent... Mostly it wipes out [hundreds] of state laws that you and I have worked so hard [on] -- whether it's the partial-birth abortion laws or just protecting a mom's health." Even more ironically, considering the bill's name, "This legislation would allow these abortions to be done in a garage [or a] back room apartment... States would [not be able to] say, 'Look, if you're doing abortions, you have to at least have it at the same level as a surgery center that's certified by the health department... And no longer would they require physicians to do this procedure. They would allow nurse midwives, physician's assistants to do the procedure."

To Marshall, that's downright terrifying. "I'm telling you, I'm trained as an obstetrician myself -- and I would never even dream of letting an intern do this procedure... This will cost women their lives. It's going to cost their future fertility. We'll have women bleeding to death, infected, and infertile because of these procedures being done by novices... You think about these late-term abortions that they would be performing. They're so complicated [and] hard to perform. It scares me to death."

In the end, the idea was so radical that Democrats couldn't even keep their own party in line. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) crossed over to vote against the bill, helping it fail 46-48. In a country where only eight percent of voters think abortion should be legal in the third trimester, even abortion sympathizers like Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters that the language was too "extreme."

For now, the bill is effectively dead -- and so, too, may be the reelection campaigns of Democrats in swing states like Senator Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Raphael Warnock (Ga.), Catherine Cortez-Masto (Nev.). As John McCormack points out in NRO, "While this vote might demonstrate to hardcore pro-abortion voters that the Democrats are in their corner, especially in a post-Roe America, the electoral risks to Democrats in an already dismal midterms outlook far outweigh the possible benefits."

This was a messaging bill, and the message is: Democrats are obsessed with brutal, inhumane, late-term abortion. And they won't stop pursuing this culture of killing until we stop them at the polls.