Musings on the New Indiana Abortion Bill
Indiana lawmakers are supposed to be working on a new bill to tighten abortion restrictions and everyone on the interwebs and assorted social media sites seem to be quite hot and bothered about it.
From what I understand of what has been proposed, the new law would basically ban all abortions except for cases of rape, incest, and life-of-the-mother situations and would add monetary fines and felony charges to physicians who intentionally violate the law.
Being the avid supporter of life, science, and human equality that I am, I think this sounds great!
For the sake of intellectual consistency, though, I still have some quibbles with the rape exception, but if this new law radically reduces the killing of unborn babies, I’m okay with it, especially since abortions due to rape account for less than 1% of all abortions (according to the Guttmacher Institute, which is basically the research arm of Planned Parenthood).
People have gotten even more tempestuous over this potential new law because of the horrifying case of the 10-year-old girl from Ohio who was raped by a Guatemalan man who likely was in the country illegally.
From what I read, the family brought the girl to Indiana to have an abortion since it’s illegal there due a 6-week abortion ban. I question the accuracy of that though since the Ohio abortion law states:
“…this section does not apply to a physician who performs a medical procedure that, in the physician’s reasonable medical judgment, is designed or intended to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”
https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2919.195
Last time I checked, 10-year-olds couldn’t safely bring babies to term and birth them.
Interestingly, it appears that the Indiana physician who performed the abortion told the news outlets about the situation before filing the police report side of things. If I understand correctly, there’s something like a 72-hour window to file these types of reports. The physician still filed it within the required time, but only after informing the news outlets about the whole thing first. Sure, it’s still technically all well and good and legal. However, it does provoke me to wonder just how much the physician actually cared about the patient and the patient’s wellbeing since the priority seemed to have been to tell the world about the political lightning rod of a story before notifying the authorities about the atrocious crime that had been committed.
Also interesting, in an interview with CBS, when asked what she had to say to the people who objected to abortions for moral reasons, the physician said, “What I would say is if you don’t believe that you would have an abortion, then don’t have one.”
Personally, I’ve always been a little appalled by this particular pro-abortion rationale. It implies that abortion is still morally okay as long the person having it is okay with it, which also means this logic can’t be applied anywhere else.
“If you don’t want to abuse your spouse, then don’t abuse your spouse”; “If you don’t want to own a slave, then don’t own one”; “If you don’t want to torture puppies, then don’t torture puppies”; “If you don’t like stealing, then don’t steal.” All of these examples ignore the fact that doing the bad thing is still a bad thing even if the person doing the bad thing is okay with doing the bad thing.
Another problem I have with this is that it blatantly neglects science. Especially now since covid became popular, everyone for the most part has been obnoxiously obsessive over “the science” of things. Well, science says that unique human life begins at conception. Here is an entire article from the American College of Pediatricians about the science when life begins. I’ll summarize the important part:
“The American College of Pediatricians concurs with the body of scientific evidence that corroborates that a unique human life starts when the sperm and egg bind to each other in a process of fusion of their respective membranes and a single hybrid cell called a zygote, or one-cell embryo, is created.”
https://acpeds.org/position-statements/when-human-life-begins
Also commonly referred to as “conception” or “fertilization.”
So I guess the next logical question is this: Is unique human life inherently valuable and worth protecting?
If it’s not, then all of this is a non-issue. Really, if the answer is no then I’d venture to speculate that it also means that everything is a non-issue and all of life is actually pointless, worthless, and not worthwhile in any capacity. If human life isn’t inherently valuable, then what’s the point of being an alive human?
Unless, of course, all human life actually is inherently valuable and worth protecting. If that’s the case, and it’s my belief that it is, then the pro-abortion crowd is egregiously wrong on a bunch of stuff.
The idea of life beginning at conception isn’t remotely new, but due to all of this new technology we’re seeing it more clearly than ever and it’s getting harder to ignore. Thanks to technological advancements in 3D and 4D ultrasounds, new scientific discoveries, the outright radicalism of the pro-abortion crowd, and especially now with the overturning of Roe, the pro-life community has a tremendous opportunity with new clarity to help women, families, and the most vulnerable among us.
It’s beginning to happen now, but I imagine that in 100 years there will be such a high level of scorn for this generation’s support and success at killing 2,363 unborn humans per day that it’ll be comparable only to slavery and the holocaust.