Educating

 

Educating the public about the capacity of the unborn child to experience excruciating pain as she is aborted

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H.R. 36 passes 242-184

By Dave Andrusko

Rep. Trent Franks

What a tremendous day for the Pro-Life Movement. While pro-abortionists and their legion of media supporters did (and will do) everything they can to minimize the significance of House passage of The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the 242-184 vote Wednesday is a major step forward in educating the public about the capacity of the unborn child to experience excruciating pain as she is aborted.

The New York Times (of all places) quoted pro-life Rep. Trent Franks (R-Az.) who brushed aside pro-abortion truth-mangling and succinctly put the intent and the impact of H.R. 36 in one sentence:

“No matter how it is shouted down, or what distortions, deceptive what-ifs, distractions, diversions, gotchas, twisting of words, changing the subject or blatant falsehoods the abortion industry hurls at this bill and its supporters, this bill is a deeply sincere effort, beginning at their sixth month of pregnancy, to protect both mothers and their pain-capable unborn babies from the atrocity of late-term abortion on demand.”

Exactly. More about this momentarily.

H.R. 36 is the right-to-life movement’s top congressional priority for the 114th Congress. To quote NRLC’s statement, it would, like the 11 states that have passed bills, “generally extend legal protection to unborn humans beginning at 20 weeks fetal age, based on congressional findings that by that point (and even earlier) the unborn child has the capacity to experience great pain during an abortion.”

NRLC’s letter to the House of Representatives pointed out

It is now commonplace to read about evidence that, by 20 weeks fetal age and even earlier, an unborn child responds to many forms of stimuli, including music and the mother’s voice. Claims that the same child is nevertheless insensible to the violence done to her body during an abortion should engender strong skepticism. Abortions at this stage typically are performed using a variety of techniques, including a method in which the unborn child’s arms and legs are twisted off by brute manual force, using a long stainless steel clamping tool.

(You can see a medical illustration of this common method here.)
So, if you are a pro-abortion supporter, you must (as Rep. Franks notes) talk about anything–anything–other than twisting and tearing apart a pain-capable unborn child. Can you blame them? What company does support for such incredible brutality place them in?
“We’re baffled by the message this is supposed to send,” Jodi Liggett, director of public policy at Planned Parenthood Arizona, told the Arizona Republic. “It’s just not a priority that our lawmakers ought to be working on.”

Really? Let’s see if we can help her.
The message? No civilized nation ought to do this to its own unborn children. It is barbarism, pure and simple.

Is protecting pain-capable unborn children not a priority because it is “rare”? You would anticipate that not many abortion facilities would want the greater public to know that they offer abortions past 20 weeks fetal age. But there are at least 275 abortion facilities that do.
Would it not be a “priority” because there is no support for such a measure? Think again.
In a nationwide poll of 1,623 registered voters in November 2014, The Quinnipiac University Poll found that 60% would support a law such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks, while only 33% opposed such legislation. Women voters split 59-35% in support of such a law, while independent voters supported it by 56-36%. In addition among those ages 18-29, there was 57% support for the legislation, with only 38% opposed.
And whereas virtually all Democrats voted against H.R.36, the Quinnipiac University Poll found Democrats split almost exactly for (47%) and against (46%) a bill such as Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

What ought to be higher “priority”? Additional funding for Planned Parenthood, which already receives an unholy amount of state, federal, and philanthropic money?
NRL News Today will be posting additional stories about the bill today and in days and weeks to come. Sure, there are additional hurdles to overcome, but what else is new?
Remember the battle over banning partial-birth abortion? Because of incredible persistence, it was passed, signed into law by a pro-life president, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Along the way, the public learned just how extreme the Abortion Industry and its allies really were–and are.
One day yesterday’s vote will be remembered for it genuinely was: historic.

Source: NRLC News