By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. This first ran on June 3 ,2022.
Jayd Henricks was executive director of government relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2011-2017. Yesterday he composed a piece for the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “How the Pro-Life Democrat Went Extinct.”
In the second paragraph, Mr. Henricks writes, “Following action earlier this year by the House, the Senate recently voted on the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would go far beyond Roe v. Wade by codifying into federal law the most extreme pro-abortion measures. Twelve out of 23 Catholics in the Senate voted for the bill, all of whom are Democrats. Seventy-six out of 134 Catholics in the House voted for it, all of whom, again, are Democrats.”
He adds that “Ultimately the Democratic Party, once a natural home for millions of Catholics, has become unwaveringly hostile to the Catholic citizen.”
While reading his fine op-ed, I found myself asking how could anyone of any faith, or no faith, vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act, which National Right to Life says is more accurately named the “Abortion without Limits until Birth Act”?
What the virtually uniform support for this monstrosity of a bill tells us is that Democrats’ embrace of abortion until birth has metastasized into agnosticism about whether abortion survivors should even be treated.
Had I written this a decade ago, I would have been dismissed as an alarmist. Fr. James Burtchaell was ahead of his time when he wrote In his book Rachel Weeping, that courts had begun to see the dividing line of birth “as somewhat like a state border, which an officer of one jurisdiction may disregard if he is following a fugitive in hot pursuit.”
Congratulations go out to Jayd Henricks for a perceptive and faithful history of how and where the Democrats went wrong.
He says, “How ironic that the Democratic Party, which is ostensibly built around the defense of the weak and the marginalized, is so fervidly committed to the right to kill the most vulnerable.”