At the foot of the rebuilt World Trade Center in New York City, a somber 9/11 monument features the names of the 2,606 people who died in the terrorist attack. Besides those names, it also mentions 11 unborn children. The phrase “and her unborn child” is inscribed after the names of pregnant 9/11 victims.
It is now beyond ironic that on the same plot of ground where those unborn babies are memorialized, New Yorkers are cheering a harsh new law that sanctions abortions of full-term babies. After the state’s legislature passed the Reproductive Health Act on Jan. 22, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered that the lights on top of the World Trade Center be switched to pink to celebrate abortion rights.
The law lifts a previous ban on abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. So now, an unborn child can be aborted right up to the moment of birth. Supporters of the law say it grants abortion rights to women who perhaps didn’t know they were pregnant at that stage.
What it actually does is legalize infanticide. I have to agree with New York’s Catholic Cardinal, Timothy Dolan, who called the law “ghoulish, grizzly and gruesome.”
Even some neutral observers warn that New York’s radical new stance on abortion could actually help men who attack pregnant women. In the future, if an unborn child is killed as the result of an assault on its mother, the attacker will likely not be liable for the baby’s death.
After all, if it’s not a baby until it’s outside the womb, then it just a mass of cells that can be scooped out and sent to a parking-lot dumpster. Right?
New York’s lawmakers have led this country further down the road to savagery.
I have always felt it was insane to claim that abortion promotes “women’s health” when the facts show the opposite. Abortion may be convenient for some women, and it has been legal in this country since 1973, but no health care provider can prove it is healthy to have an unborn child ripped or sucked out of a woman’s uterus before it is viable. Here are three reasons you can never convince me otherwise:
- Abortion can harm women physically and emotionally. Various studies in recent years, including one by Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, show that women who have abortions become much more likely to develop cervical cancer, sterility, nervous disorders, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Another study revealed that women with a history of abortion face higher rates of anxiety (34 percent higher) and depression (37 percent higher), and heavier alcohol use (110 percent higher). It has also been shown that women who abort are twice as likely to become heavy smokers.
- Abortion is sexist. It has always amazed me that women have campaigned the loudest for abortion rights, yet the majority of abortionists are men who profit from this horrific procedure. It is also a fact that many women, including many pregnant teenage girls, are forced by their fathers or sex partners to have unwanted abortions—resulting in increased trauma for the mothers. Why are feminists not outraged by this?
In India, many families abort female infants because they don’t want girls. This is why there are skewed sex ratios—like 1,000 men for every 618 women—in India’s Daman and Diu regions. Even though sex-selective abortions were banned several years ago in India, many female babies are aborted or abandoned at birth because of gender discrimination. Why is there not a feminist outcry about this injustice?
Mother Teresa, who ministered most of her life in India, understood the pain abortion causes women. She said: “Abortion kills twice. It kills the body of the baby and the conscience of the mother. Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three quarters of its victims are women: Half the babies and all the mothers.”
- Abortion is racist. This is the ugly truth few of us are willing to face. African-Americans make up 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, but the Centers for Disease Control reports that black women accounted for 35.4 percent of all abortions in 2009. Of the 61 million abortions in the United States since 1973, about 18 million of aborted babies were black.
Abortion kills minority children at more than three times the rate of white children. Today, abortion is the leading cause of death for African-Americans, more than all other causes combined, including AIDS, violent crimes, accidents, cancer and heart disease.
So when people talk about how abortion providers offer “health care for women,” I guess they only mean white women. Let’s not forget that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was an avowed proponent of eugenics—the elimination of “unfit” races. She worked tirelessly to keep minorities supplied with birth control (even though she herself believed abortion should be avoided). This might explain why 62 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in areas with high black populations.
New York can try to color the issue of abortion pink, but there is nothing festive about this new law. Instead of shining pink lights, Governor Cuomo should have totally shut off the lights in the World Trade Center on Jan. 22, 2019. It was a dark day for the United States.
