If you thought the Obama mandate of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization raised a furor for attacking the rights of conscience our Founding Fathers sought to protect via the First Amendment, you’ll really enjoy what is coming soon.
The prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics has just given us a sneak-peek into what ObamaCare will surely be mandating in the not-too-distant future.
The Journal published an article this month seeking to mainstream the view that infanticide is a health-improving measure. Calling it “after-birth abortion,” two philosophers argue that killing a newborn should be a purely elective decision of parents who believe the baby would be a burden or would negatively impact their family’s well being.
Similar reasons were offered last month when the Obama administration mandated that all Americans including religious objectors provide abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. The president’s “experts” imposed their view that pregnancy—a sign of healthy bodily function—is a disease that demands “preventive care,” and that the mandated items will enhance women’s health, improve family spacing, and prevent costs and other serious burdens.
They also said surgical abortion offers the same “potential health and well-being benefits,” though they did not mandate it (yet). But very little intellectual distance exists between their argument to prevent the expensive health threat of unwanted children and the Journal for Medical Ethics’ view that “after-birth abortion” does the same.
The abortifacient mandate by the Obama administration is just the opening skirmish in a long conflict between ObamaCare and religious freedom. ObamaCare writes hundreds of blank checks that empower the Department of Health and Human Services to mandate countless health standards. Abortion-inducing drugs is only one of numerous “cutting edge” medical ethics proposals that will be imposed on America by HHS experts from Planned Parenthood, Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society), and promoters of experimentation on embryos and on other harvested human beings.
The ideologues behind the administration’s mandate also share the same penchant for euphemism displayed by advocates of “after-birth abortion.” Those authors, despite their brashness, betray an implicit shame about their view, because they feel the need to label infanticide as “abortion” to ease people’s acceptance of the idea.
Likewise President Obama insists that his mandate is “contraceptive” even though it includes many methods that can kill human embryos a week or more after they are conceived. He does so on the theory that conception doesn’t really happen until the (conceived) embryo implants in the uterus two weeks later. So the president is really mandating “after-conception contraception.”
But euphemisms eventually fall away. The FDA recently jettisoned this same implantation landmark by approving as “contraception” a drug called Ella, which studies show can act to destroy a human embryo after implantation just like RU-486 destroys it a few weeks later.
So if post-conception killing is “contraception,” and post implantation killing is “contraception,” there is simply nothing left but for HHS to mandate the “after-birth contraception” of infanticide. As HHS experts have “proven,” and as the Journal of Medical Ethics now concurs, children who are unwanted or come at an inappropriate time cause a multitude of expensive public health problems, and they restrict the autonomy of mothers and families.
Some might consider this argument far-fetched, but it is supported at the highest levels of government. President Obama built his political career as an Illinois state senator by fighting for the right to this lethal version of “after-birth contraception,” when he opposed a state law that would have outlawed infanticide on children accidentally born alive during abortion. He called the law an attack on the rights protected in Roe v. Wade.
Let that sink in: the constitutional right of privacy, which is specifically a right to contraception and abortion, is threatened by a law punishing infanticide, according to President Obama. Logically, he must also believe the Constitution protects the right to “after-birth contraception” by infanticide. Surely his bureaucracy, which knows what Americans need and has begun to force us all to accept it, will also guarantee universal access to the marvelous health benefit of “after-birth contraception” that “prevents” the life of your already-born child.
LifeNews Note: Matt Bowman is legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund (www.telladf.org), a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.
