Kristan HawkinsWhen it comes to gun violence in schools, people get outraged about children in danger of losing their lives. It’s a worthy concern. According to Education Week, in 2018 28 students were killed in school shootings, while so far in 2019, 2 children have been killed.
The violence that many people mourn in the womb seems to have permeated the abortion debate, as one dehumanizing act leads to another. Just this week, posters announcing my campus speaking tour were lit on fire at Western Washington University, with no regard to the devastation that could have occurred if the flames were not put out.
Risk-averse college and university campuses in recent years have looked at all kinds of programming that has the potential to put students in harm's way, from cybersecurity to Greek life. Consider the rolled-back support for fraternities following hazing incidents and reports of racist conduct. Just this year, a student death at the University of California, Irvine, lead to a fraternity suspension. With schools counting the costs of things like fraternities or credit card marketing on campuses, the renewed push to force all California college and university health care centers to distribute chemical abortion drugs is hard to fathom.
A trio of female leaders representing grassroots organizations with a national presence spearheaded a Capitol Hill briefing on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) earlier this month to illustrate, once more, that the abortion agenda has hijacked the women’s movement, to the detriment of what women truly want and need.
Charles Dickens could appreciate the strange circumstances that preborn infants survive these days, as technology and innovation create the best of times and the worst of times for those who have not yet been born. Case in point, the daughter of Bethan Simpson and her husband Kieron who at 24 weeks (6 months) in the womb, was operated on for spina bifida, a condition in which a baby’s spinal column does not fully close during development. Earlier this month, the infant was removed from her mother’s womb for the procedure and then returned to continue growing.
So much of the conversation surrounding abortion laws focuses on what women presumably want, with abortion advocates talking passionately about empowerment, control, or choice. But rarely do we acknowledge that laws regulating abortion often protect women from men who wish to hurt them or abortionists who don’t care if women are hurt at all. A default position in favor of abortion and against life-affirming laws can harm women and children, as illustrated in New York and Louisiana this week.
It’s almost cliché in pro-life circles that on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade for coming close to 50 years, hundreds of thousands of people march for life, and almost no one in the media can see them. Like Pro-Life Ninjas, they move in and out of the nation’s capitol undetected....until a teenager with a “Make America Great Again” hat was faced with a reality of political life today, the professional protestor causing agitation while fellow activists filmed attempts to cause a media moment.
In the same month in which hundreds of thousands will come to Washington D.C. to March for Life in sad memorial of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that created a legal right to abortion, the justices may take up a case that gives them the chance to reconsider. Vice President Mike Pence cracked the door to that possibility in 2016 with the stroke of a pen in defense of women in a unique #MeToo moment.
The anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Doe V. Bolton approaches, marking the beginning of the debate over whether abortion is truly a Constitutional right and what that looks like in daily life.
