I just returned from the 2013 National Right to Life Convention in Dallas, Texas, followed by a week-long visit with my family in my hometown of Laredo, Texas. Needless to say, the topics of Gov. Rick Perry’s second special session and pro-life legislation were inescapable.
But it was inescapable in a great way! In the week I was home, I saw two pro-life letters to the editor, a pro-life rally that was reported in the newspaper and on the local Univision affiliate, and after Spanish-language Mass, there was even a 5-minute presentation from a Pro-Life youth group about the proposed legislation and how it would save lives.
Many Texas folks understand that this Pro-Life legislation is a huge step in the right direction for Texas in our ongoing campaign to protect innocent, vulnerable, unborn humans. I’d wager to say that Texans also fully understand that a group of pro-abortion activists didn’t elect their Texas legislators and that those legislators were sent to Austin by mostly Pro-Life people.
Perhaps nothing will change the fact that some members of the Texas legislature intend to vote to keep legal the type of abortions in which unborn babies have their arm and legs clamped and ripped off with brute manual force. Perhaps nothing will change the hearts of these legislators who are standing in favor of lower standards of care for women who are seeking an abortion. Those thoughts are deeply troubling.
But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps if enough pro-life people patiently, lovingly, factually make our case, those whose hearts seem so hard might consider the tremendous amounts of evidence that shows that by 20 weeks fetal age the unborn child is capable of feeling pain.
The fact that abundant scientific evidence shows that this is true physiologically, behaviorally, and anatomically can be ignored but not made to go away. Consider the breadth of the evidence from the website doctorsonfetalpain.com alone.
Taken together with the testimony from expert witnesses who have testified before Congress both at a national level as well at the several statehouses in which similar laws have already passed. Consider the words of medical experts brought together by Texas Right to Life.
I hope these legislators also consider that largely ignored, if not completely unregulated, abortion facilities cost the lives of born as well as unborn patients. I know this from friends in Alabama who witnessed a dangerous scenario when a young lady could not easily be removed from such a place and taken to a hospital to receive real care.
We have also witnessed it with abortionist Kermit Gosnell, convicted of three counts of murder, and even near D.C. with the death of a young woman who died of complications after her abortion. Abortion is always a deadly prospect for the unborn, why must it also be a gamble for women?
Only the mob of orange-shirted protesters who literally drowned out the voice of the Texas people with their shouts could convince themselves that these commonsense provisions are “radical.” Yet I wonder how many of them realized exactly what they were fighting for. How many had accepted unthinkingly Planned Parenthood’s tiresome rhetoric that there was an ongoing “war on women” and that in working against unborn children capable of feeling pain and their mothers somehow history was being made.
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But perhaps history was being made, just not in the sense they mean. Billion-dollar-budget Planned Parenthood had managed to gather a small army of pro-abortion advocates (not necessarily a difficult task considering the demographics of Austin and its proximity to the massive University of Texas whose school color was adopted by the group) and convinced them that they needed to fight in a war to ensure a Texas woman’s right to painfully abort her child after 20 weeks gestational age.
This despite the overwhelming support this kind of law has from the Texas people (62% in a recent poll conducted by the Texas Tribune newspaper) and especially from the Hispanic community which is even more Pro-Life than the population of Texas generally.
As Texans grasp that they are being spoon-fed pro-abortion lies, history will be made as this important piece of pro-life legislation is passed.
