It's hard to put into perspective the implications of the new abortion law recently passed in New York State. Senate Bill S2796 is being called the Reproductive Health Act by its promoters. But it's not about reproductive health. It's about abortion. Did they really need to make it easier? One in three babies are already being aborted in New York.
The force of the new law is that in the state of New York, any woman has a 'fundamental right" to an abortion, basically without restriction. There is lip service for authorizing late term abortion only for what is "necessary to protect the patient's life or health" but in Doe v. Bolton, written on the same day as Roe v. Wade and by the same author, Justice Harry Blackmun, it becomes clear that this is actually no restriction at all. Justice Blackmun wrote that even late term abortion was justified based on such criteria as the woman's mental state, physical state, psychological state, familial state or age. If an abortion doctor can't find their excuse or reason in that, then they aren't looking.
But now it doesn't even have to be a doctor. One of the biggest sections of the
new New York law is that it strikes down the criminal provisions of many, many other laws. With a broad brush it removes the criminal penalty for almost any action, by almost any person, against an unborn child.
It also means that if someone injures a pregnant woman and her baby is injured or killed, legally there has been no crime against the baby, only against the mother.
The reason for the new law is fear. Many who support abortion believe that the Supreme Court could conceivably take away the "right" given in 1973 in Roe v. Wade and they have moved to decriminalize abortion, period. Since many constitutional scholars on all sides of the debate have agreed that Roe v. Wade was terrible law, in and of itself, their concern is not totally unwarranted.
In the past, pro-abortion folks have generally argued that abortion isn't murder because a "fetus" is not a baby but rather an "unviable tissue mass." The debate is no longer hiding under the pretense of the science of survival, this is clearly an issue of birth control, plain and simple.
Too bad for Kermit Gosnell that he was not performing abortions in New York State under the new law. In 2013 he was convicted in Pennsylvania on first degree murder of several infants who were "born" during the abortion process and "terminated" after they continued to live, and breathe, and cry. Under the new law there is no crime in "Not treating an infant born alive accidentally - because it repealed the law that granted legal protection to such children, and because abortionists are not going to treat the child that they were in the process of killing in the womb moments earlier." (Ed Mechmann, "Here's What the New Abortion Law Really Says", 1/30/19)
As one observer noted, "The new law does not contain any meaningful restriction that is likely to ever prevent an abortion." (Sam Sawyer, America, "Explainer: What New York's new abortion law does and doesn't do")
God hates the hands that shed innocent blood, (Prov. 6:1 7). How could anything on God's green earth ever be more innocent than an unborn baby?
And how could anything be more evil than a mother willing to order that innocent life snuffed out? Over sixty million children have been intentionally killed in the U.S. since 1973. God help us.
- Tim Orbison