If you ingest a steady dose of daily news, it would be easy to grow weary of the din of the average day, the discordant sounds of a culture awash in controversy. An issue may startle and grab you, but just as soon as you begin to digest it, another wild and upsetting story comes along, like the rolling tide of a stormy sea.
I was thinking about this the other day, pondering how it’s possible that both the president of the United States and the House of Representatives support sex-selection abortion.
I was thinking about how it’s possible that not only could they support such a thing, but how the news cycle could move on so quickly from something so tragic.
The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act would have prevented a woman from aborting her baby simply because of its gender. It’s that simple and straightforward, and yet it couldn’t garner enough votes for passage in Congress.
I am not naïve or a political rube, but sometimes, I just don’t get it.
The other side says “safe, legal, and rare” as a recurring mantra regarding abortion, but if they can’t even support this, aren’t their elemental arguments hollow?
Writing in the Washington Post, pro-life advocate, U.S. Representative Christopher Smith served up a powerful reflection on this cultural contradiction:
Sex-selection abortion is cruel, it’s discriminatory and it’s legal. It is violence against women. Most people in government are unaware that it is part of a deliberate plan of population control. This is the real war on women.
Rep. Smith went on to highlight the work that the pro-life group Live Action has been doing to bring to light some of the more horrendous practices of Planned Parenthood. In one particular sting operation, a representative of the abortion provider instructs a woman, who says she doesn’t want a girl, to wait until her preborn baby is developed enough in order to determine its gender. She’s told that at five months she’ll know – and could then abort the baby.
When Planned Parenthood was confronted with a tape of the chilling conversation, a spokesperson was unapologetic. “No Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one,” she responded, “except in states that explicitly prohibit sex-selection abortions.”
In other words, there is no condition or issue too small to justify an abortion. Hair or eye color? How about skin tone? It would appear that Planned Parenthood would have no objection to a woman aborting a baby for any or all of those reasons. In fact, Live Action has even recorded various Planned Parenthood clinics eagerly accepting donations targeted specifically for the abortion of African-American babies.
The news cycle is relentless and many issues that are important today fade by the day’s last light. But this is an issue that’s not going away. No culture that supports abortion, let alone sex-selection abortion, can run from the moral implications of such policy.
Abortion in general, and sex-selection abortion in particular, are issues that will haunt this nation until every life is viewed as sacred and protected under law.
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