By Dave Andrusko
On Thursday we took a peek inside the mind of the editorial board of the New York Times. You didn’t need an MRI to gauge that, at least as it relates to abortion, it is not a pretty sight.
We were discussing its latest unhinged diatribe against the state of Texas and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for having the audacity to pass H.B. 2 (that was Texas’ fault) and then upholding the law almost in its entirety (the blame for that fell on the unanimous opinion of the three-judge panel).
You’ll remember that the appeals court panel concluded that H.B. 2’s requirement that abortionists have admitting privileges to a local hospital, and that abortion clinics meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers were (with a couple of exceptions) perfectly valid.
But from its Olympian perch at the top of the editorial mountain, the Times’ found them stupefyingly unnecessary and intolerably expensive. In its collective wisdom, they could find no justification. We debunked that nonsense yesterday. Hold that thought for a second as we move to a related point.
Even further to the left on the ideological spectrum is The Nation. Perma Levy wrote a piece whose headline deftly summarizes her argument–“The Supreme Court Could Make Abortion One of 2016’s Big Campaign Issues: And that could be bad news for Republicans.”
What she is saying is that one or another abortion cases could make their way of the legal ladder (most likely Texas’s H.B. 2) and be decided a year from now, during a presidential year, and that would spell doom for Republicans. Let’s think about that for a second.
To pro-abortionists, it’s a slam dunk. They will scream “reproductive rights”; “undue burden”; “unfair to poor women”; and some iteration of all of this representing the tiresome “war on women” and the public will turn on the pro-life Republican presidential candidate.
Levy (and, doubtless, the editorial board of the Times) believes such boilerplate is so emotionally compelling there is no answer. Like a tsunami it will wash over the hapless Republican and he or she will drown in a tidal wave of pro-abortion sound bites and gibberish.
Really?
What issues are raised by H.B. 2 and more broadly abortion cases having to do with, say, ultrasounds, parental involvement, the capacity of unborn children at 20 weeks to feel pain, and fetal dismemberment?
You can broadly categorize them as follows.
#1. Are parents, by and large, a pregnant teen’s ally and best counsel or her enemy? To the pro-abortion mind, parents are best seen and not heard–or not even seen, come to think of it. Most people, especially parents, passionately disagree.
#2. Is the Abortion Industry the one sterling exception to the rule that medical facilities ought to be supervised and overseen? Do we really believe that fly-in abortionists who parachute in and abort up to 40 or 50 women a day are really “doctors” in any recognizable sense of the word, let alone “concerned about their patients”? Does it make sense that if he doesn’t have admitting privileges to a local hospital, it’s just fine for him to dial up the physician who is looking at the woman whose abortion he has just botched?
#3. Did we learn nothing from Kermit Gosnell about what happens when abortion clinics are not inspected for years, even decades, at a time? Did we forget–or never know–that, for example, it is critically important that hallways be wide enough for gurneys to pass through to remove injured women to safety?
#4. How many people, if they take time to think about it, will doubt that an unborn baby half-way through her development can experience pain? If true (and it is), how does that knowledge coexist with how babies are aborted? Arms and legs yanked off, skulls crushed, torsos disarticulated. There are many more issues a pro-life candidate (presidential or otherwise) could raise, but we’ll end with this.
#5. Is this the best we can do as a nation? Over one million aborted babies each year? Is that our future? We are disemboweling our “future,” including aborting at least 11,000 to 13,000 babies after 20 weeks.
I don’t think so. You don’t think so. The pro-life Republican presidential candidate won’t think so. And, if properly educated, neither will the American people.