Bishop describes new Minnesota abortion as “the worst kind of barbarism”

By Dave Andrusko

 Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron was not exaggerating in the least when he labeled Minnesota’s new abortion law “the worst kind of barbarism.”  Nor was Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life overstating the case when it said The Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act established Minnesota “as a global outlier on abortion policy.”

The law is that awful.

“The PRO Act means a right to abort any baby for any reason at any time up to birth,” said MCCL Co-Executive Director Cathy Blaeser. “It means that the elective killing of a human being in utero is perfectly legal even in the third trimester of pregnancy, when the child can feel excruciating pain and could live outside the womb. It means that parents have no right to know when their teenage daughter has been taken to undergo an abortion.”

She concluded “Gov. Walz’s absolutist abortion policy puts Minnesota in the company of just a small handful of countries around the world, including North Korea and China. It is extreme, inhumane, and harmful to women and children who deserve so much better.”

Bishop Barron said in a January 31 video on social media following pro-abortion Gov. Tim Walz’s signing the bill, “I want to share with you my anger, my frustration over this terrible law that was just signed by the governor in Minnesota — the most really extreme abortion law that’s on the books in the wake of the Roe v. Wade reversal.”

“Basically, it eliminates any kind of parental notifications so a 12-year-old child can get an abortion without even telling her parents about it,” Barron continued.  “But the worst thing,” he added, “is it basically permits abortion all the way through pregnancy up to the very end. And indeed, indeed if a child somehow survives a botched abortion, the law now prohibits an attempt to save that child’s life.”

Reporting for the Catholic News Agency, Joe Bukuras wrote that

In his video, Barron added: “What strikes me is this: If a child is born and now a day old, or two days old and resting peacefully in his bassinet and someone broke into the house and with a knife killed the child and dismembered him, well, the whole country would rise up in righteous indignation.”

“But yet, that same thing can happen with complete impunity as the child is in his mother’s womb about to be born. Again, I just think this is so beyond the pale and that we’ve so lost our way on this issue.”

The Associated Press wrote that “Democratic leaders took advantage of their new control of both houses of the Legislature to rush the bill through in the first month of the 2023 legislative session.”

Let’s start with the Democrat’s ‘new control” of both houses (and the governor’s office as well). “The House passed the bill 69-65 less than two weeks ago,” the AP’s Steve Karnowski wrote, “and party discipline held firm during a 15-hour debate in the Senate that ended in a 34-33 vote early Saturday.”

So a genuinely radical bill that omits all “guardrails”—limitations—on abortion passed by the narrowest of margins in the Senate and just four in the House. So, yes indeed, you could say that Democrats “took advantage” of the outcome of the November elections.

According to Bukuras, Bishop Barron “acknowledged that there was no possibility of blocking the now-enacted legislation, but said that ‘we can certainly keep raising our voices in protest.’

“We can keep praying for an end to this barbaric regime in our country.”