An Oklahoma state senator has proposed a bill to protect unborn babies by making abortion a crime of first-degree murder.
Christian Today reports Oklahoma state Sen. Joe Silk, a pro-life Republican, is the sponsor of state Senate Bill 1118, which would define human life as beginning at the moment of conception and make it criminal to kill an unborn baby in an abortion. The bill is scheduled to be debated in a state Senate hearing on Tuesday, according to the report.
The bill states that an abortion “means the use or prescription of any instrument, medicine, drug or any other substance or device used to intentionally kill an unborn human being.” It would protect human life, defined as the “offspring of human beings from the moment of conception until either live birth or death, including the human conceptus, zygote, morula, blastocyst, embryo and fetus, whether conceived or located inside or outside the body of a human female.”
The bill has public support from the Abolitionist Society of Norman, which circulated a petition asking state lawmakers to ban abortion, the report states. It has about 30,000 signatures, according to the report.
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“[W]e hereby respectfully demand that our state government stop protecting the murder of children by abortion within its jurisdiction and establish justice for all pre-born human beings in our state,” the petition reads, according to Christian News Network. “We demand that our legislators stop passing laws to regulate abortion and instead outlaw all abortion as murder.”
The report has more details:
The petition said the abortion ban should happen now, “not five, 10 or 15 years down the road. In short, we the people of the state of Oklahoma demand the total and immediate abolition of human abortion as the legal, constitutional and moral duty of our elected and appointed officials.”
The Abolitionist Society of Norman is leading the call to outlaw abortion and said Silk’s “bill aims to protect all children from destruction in Oklahoma, and bring Oklahoma law into compliance with the United States Constitution.”
“This bill unabashedly defies the Supreme Court’s perversion and denunciation of the constitutional right to life, and seeks to establish justice for those being deprived of life without due process of law,” they added.
A similar bill introduced this winter, Oklahoma Senate Bill 1552, would take away the medical license of any physician who does an abortion, according to the report. The bill also would make abortion a felony punishable with up to three years in prison, the report states.
While the motives of these bills are excellent, they are unlikely to become law given the current political situation in America. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that states cannot restrict a woman’s so-called right to abortion. If the Oklahoma bills became law, abortion advocates almost certainly would challenge them in the courts. Given the current U.S. Supreme Court justices’ records, the laws likely would be struck down and Roe v. Wade upheld.
Because of Roe, American abortion laws line up with human rights abusive countries like China and North Korea in their permissiveness of abortion. The U.S. is one of four countries in the world to allow late-term abortions for any reason. Most other countries have laws restricting or banning abortion. The deadly decision has allowed more than 58 million unborn babies’ lives to be unjustly taken in the past 43 years.
Roe, a decision made by nine male justices in 1973, stands in the way of life-protecting laws that most Americans support. That’s why overturning the deadly decision Roe v. Wade has been a key strategy of pro-life groups for decades.
