Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that bans abortions after 20 weeks may have no hope of passing into law, but it may have already managed to leave the abortion debate in America forever changed.
Writing for National Review, Frank Cannon and Jeffrey Bell of the Washington-based American Principles Project say that the June 18 passage of this bill in the U.S. House of Representatives has the potential to produce the most dramatic shift in the abortion debate since the election of America’s first pro-abortion president, Bill Clinton, in 1992.
Voting on the ban, which fell mostly along party lines, forced 190 Democrats to go on the record as being against restrictions that would protect viable newborns from being neglected to death or, worse, having the spines snipped.
“Now, facing independent advertising expenditures being prepared by several pro-life and social-conservative groups, they will find themselves asked to explain why they favor a right to abort viable babies — including in the ninth month of pregnancy — in Gosnell-like surroundings,” Cannon and Bell write.
“Judging from attempts within the last few days at such explanations by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Colorado representative Diana DeGette, co-chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus, even the most sophisticated pro-abortion Democrats are utterly unprepared to answer such questions.”
Rep. Pelosi stumbled terribly when Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack asked at a news conference what moral distinction she drew between late term abortion and how Kermit Gosnell snipped the spines of born-alive infants in his West Philadelphia clinic.
“You’re taking the extreme case,” Pelosi stammered. “I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics. And that’s where you’re taking it and I’m not going there.”
McCormack summed up her response quite succinctly. ” It was a simple question. You didn’t answer.”
Nor did another pro-abortion stalwart of the House, Rep. Diana DeGette. She was asked by a reporter for CNS News why her desire to save one life when it comes to gun control doesn’t apply to the case of saving a viable infant born alive after an abortin.
“Well, this is, this is. … We already have laws in many states of this country,” DeGette said. “This bill is…is blatantly unconstitutional. And, and if you look at the perceived—if you look at the stated reason of doing this legislation, the Kermit Gosnell case, that gentleman was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.”
John Sexton of Breitbart summed up the exchange by saying the only coherent part of DeGette’s response was about the constitutionality of the ban. “But that’s really all she’s got. Everything else is the grinding sound of a pro-choice brain struggling to find the right gear and failing.”
The abortion ban caught abortion supporters off-guard right from the start, especially when it managed to get on the House calendar with only a few days’ notice.
“Many pro-lifers, inspired by the Gosnell case and other abortion-clinic scandals, were eager to prepare for the vote with extensive congressional hearings,” Cannon and Bell write. “Desirable as such hearings were and are in the larger battle for public opinion, the unexpected nature of the issue’s arrival on the House floor caught many Democrats flatfooted, with zero ability to minimize or obfuscate the starkness of their vote to permit the killing of viable babies.”
As a result, they will now have to return to their districts where most American voters, with their eyes newly opened to the atrocities done to newborns at the hands of Kermit Gosnell, will be asking much the same question as Pelosi and DeGette faced – how can you vote in favor of snipping babies’ spines?
The tables may have turned, Cannon and Bell assert, and the abortion elites now find themselves in the awkward position of having a recorded vote that puts them “in the position of defending a practice that most American voters find indefensible.”
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