By Dave Andrusko
Texas AG Kenneth Paxton
Kenneth Paxton is the passionately pro-life Attorney General of Texas. A friend forwarded me a terrific commentary the AG wrote for the National Catholic Register under the thoughtful heading of “Why Texas Ban on Brutal Dismemberment Is Central to US Abortion Debate.”
He begins with the necessary background. As we’ve reported at National Right to Life News Today, a reliably pro-abortion judge– U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel of Austin– struck down Texas’s Senate Bill 8, “our state law banning live dismemberment abortions.” {See here and here.}
Paxton is appealing that bizarre decision to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and his commentary is a splendid defense of the legal and ethical justification for S.B. 8. I want you to read his commentary in its entirety, so here are just a couple of highlights.
First the unvarnished description of what a dismemberment of a living human being actually is:
S.B. 8 banned the barbaric practice of killing the unborn by dismemberment in the womb. It takes place in the second trimester and onwards, at which point the baby is easily recognizable as a small human, sporting fingers, toes, arms, legs and developed facial features. The abortionist gropes around inside the uterus using forceps to — literally — tear the living unborn baby limb from limb. It is as slow and cruel a death as it sounds. It has no place in a civilized society.
Pro-abortionists (as they always do) pretend there is no way they can kill babies “in the second trimester and onwards.” Alas, they still can. As Paxton wrote S.B. 8 “forbid[s] their needless torture and disfigurement in the process.”
The associated pro-abortion lament is that these other alternative methods are dangerous (to the mother). Paxton explains, “In the past five years, there has not been a single reported complication from any of those alternatives.”
There is much more, but let me end with this from Attorney General Paxton:
S.B. 8 has moral and legal justifications enough to stand on its own, and I am confident that it will. But in the last analysis, abortion is a degradation of the value of human life, subjecting something inherently precious to the arbitrary will of another person. It is fundamentally inconsistent with the equal dignity of all people, a principle that President Abraham Lincoln called the “sheet anchor” of American government.
America is ordered to the preservation of our self-evident, God-given rights — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Abortion deprives human beings of the most fundamental right, the one without which all others are meaningless.
And then follows the most important idea—Paxton’s own “sheet anchor” –of this brilliant commentary.
Fortunately, America also has a proud tradition of bringing its laws into harmony with this foundational truth about human nature. If past is prologue, our laws and courts will soon recognize the rights of the unborn.
Bravo!
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