Oklahoma AG Defends Banning Abortions: “Innocent Human Lives are at Stake”

State   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Oct 11, 2022   |   12:48PM   |   Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Oklahoma Attorney General John M. O’Connor’s office defended state pro-life laws last week against a lawsuit by abortionists, telling the state Supreme Court that “innocent human lives are at stake.”

Oklahoma is one of more than a dozen states that protects unborn babies by banning abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. Exceptions are allowed if the mother’s life is at risk, but otherwise killing unborn babies in abortions is now a crime in the state.

The Oklahoman reports O’Connor’s office refuted claims from medical groups and abortionists that killing unborn babies is “health care” and a constitutional “right” in a brief to the Oklahoma Supreme Court last week.

There is no fundamental right “to dismember a living human and let him or her bleed to death,” state Solicitor General Zach West wrote in the brief. “The Legislature is in no way required to stand aside when innocent human lives are at stake.

“Quite the opposite. If some in the medical community now recklessly insist on exposing the most vulnerable humans among us to destruction, it is the state’s duty to intervene,” West continued, according to the report.

The lawsuit from abortionists argues that the Oklahoma Constitution guarantees a woman’s “right” to abortion under her rights to “liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry.”

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Several prominent medical groups, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Medical Association, Oklahoma State Medical Association and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, support the lawsuit, The Oklahoman reports.

But the attorney general’s office and other doctors in the state accused these medical groups of ignoring that there are two patients in every pregnancy: a mother and her unborn child.

West said the court should not give any “weight whatsoever” to the pro-abortion medical groups’ arguments because they fail to consider “the unborn patient,” the report continues.

He described how unborn babies sometimes are aborted by being dismembered, torn limb from limb while their hearts are still beating – a barbaric practice; and he said the state has a duty to protect innocent lives from such violence.

A group of Oklahoma doctors also wrote a brief supporting the pro-life law and pushing back against their colleagues’ pro-abortion arguments.

“Physicians and legislators, in our view, must consider and protect both the woman and unborn child, which is why abortion is not, and cannot be, a fundamental right,” they told the court.

They said the Oklahoma State Medical Association completely ignored the fact that a pregnant mother has a “separate, unique and living human being inside her womb,” and her child deserves the same quality health care as every other patient, according to the report.

“One of OSMA’s stated goals is to ‘promote quality health care for all Oklahomans,’” the doctors wrote. “All, in our view, must mean all.”

Earlier this year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court allowed the state to enforce its pro-life laws, but the high court did not rule yet on the case itself.

In May, Oklahoma became the first state in nearly 50 years to protect unborn babies by banning all abortions. As a result, as many as 3,800 unborn babies will be saved from abortions every year.

Since Roe in 1973, more than 63 million unborn babies and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mothers have died in supposedly “safe,” legal abortions in the U.S. The infamous ruling forced states to legalize abortions up to viability and allowed abortions for any reason up to birth.

In the historic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling, the Supreme Court overturned Roe and allowed states to protect unborn babies from abortion again. Fifteen already have done so, although some have been blocked by court orders, and more state are expected to enact pro-life laws in the future.