"Values Voters" Have Two Big Pro-Life Votes This Election Season 
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by Janice Shaw Crouse
October 22, 2006
There are two big-ticket, values-voters issue campaigns in the upcoming midterm election. The ramifications of the outcomes for the two issues would be hard to overestimate.
Some previous threats to the nation’s moral and ethical standards have been imposed by judicial fiat of tyrannical liberal judges legislating from the bench, but not this time. Two great moral issues of election 2006 will be determined at the polls and it is the people’s voice that will determine the outcome.
Tragically, far too many values voters are blasé; many remain clueless to the far-reaching ramifications of the vote on these issues.
Vote No on Missouri’s Amendment 2
This amendment merges cloning and embryonic stem cell research. It has been called a Trojan horse because it’s structured to hide the true purpose and details. The multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign highlights the supposed cures from stem cell research—carefully obscuring the distinctions between adult stem cell research (with proven results in medical use) and embryonic stem cell research (not even promising research results yet).
Even more disturbing is that private funding from owners of one research institute guarantees that institute millions in public funds.
Further, the amendment is advertised and promoted through lies and distortions; the selling of the bill contradicts the provisions that are incorporated in the bill. Those who are supporting the amendment are misleading the voting public at important points.
The headlines say that Amendment 2 bans cloning, but the small print makes cloning a constitutional right.
According to the Missouri legislation, embryonic implantation is fine as long as the intent is not to produce life. In other words, the proposition makes it acceptable to farm eggs—a procedure that preys on poor and vulnerable women by subjecting them to super-ovulation procedures with huge potential for harm to women’s health.
Many pro-life Americans believe that this five-page proposition is at the front line of the pro-life battle; that the number of abortions today is a fraction of the potential destruction of life from passage of this amendment. Estimates are that 43% of Missouri residents call themselves “evangelical.” If all were values voters who knew the details of the bill, it would go down in flames.
Vote Yes on South Dakota’s Referred Law 6
In South Dakota, values voters face a similar distortion of the facts. That state’s Referred Law 6 protects unborn life along with women’s health. The opponents of the law claim that it lacks provisions for: 1) rape and incest victims (note that less than 2% of abortions in South Dakota have been due to rape or incest), 2) covering medical care for women who have been assaulted, 3) won’t allow abortion to save the life of the mother, and 4) leaves doctors vulnerable to law suits when they are conducting legitimate medical procedures on women that result in a pre-born baby’s death. All four claims are false.
The law protects women and doctors in the instances mentioned previously. More importantly, it recognizes that abortion hurts women. The South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion reviewed more 3,500 pages of scientific research, collected affidavits from 2,000 women who had undergone abortions, and interviewed 54 experts to conclude that abortion has lasting, devastating effects on women’s lives.
Values voters can’t miss the importance of the issues in these two states.
A look at a corporate corollary could be instructive. Remember Enron, Arthur Anderson and the five or six other giant companies who no longer exist or are a shadow of their former selves? What contributed to their downfall? Was it competition from similar companies or influences from sources outside the company? Of course not. Their destruction came from inside, from within, from the moral values that were discarded when they conflicted with the selfish needs of those in authority.
Executives chose egos and income over morals and values. Those destructive forces from within those companies brought them down, landed the executives in jail, and hurt—and in some cases destroyed—tens of thousands of other people in the process. Why? Because they didn’t want to operate from a moral base of integrity and honesty; they ignored honesty and fairness to recklessly pursue their own profit.
The moral decay from within brought them down.
Two states face a similar choice in less than three weeks. Will the people vote for what is right or choose to ignore the ramifications and follow the popular and politically correct path?
