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Thursday, April 23, 2015
Montana Anesthesia Abortion Bill -- It's OK to Kill as Long as Your Victim Doesn't Feel Pain? by Rebecca Kiessling
About a month ago, I first heard
about the Montana “Unborn Child Pain and Suffering Act,” (HB 479)
which is their version of the “Pain-Capable” bill. However, instead of banning late-term
abortions based upon the premise that unborn children feel pain, this bill, as
now passed by the Legislature and sent to the Governor for approval, merely
requires that the mother be informed that her 20 week+ (from conception) unborn
child may feel pain during the abortion and that she has the option to consent
to anesthesia for the child.
Right away, I felt ill to my stomach because, as far as I’m aware, this would be the first time in American history that a precedent would be set that it’s okay to kill your innocent victim as long as he or she doesn’t feel pain, or as the bill now stands – as long as those involved in the killing are told that the victim might feel pain. Just think of how far-reaching such a dangerous precedent could be extended: euthanasia of special-needs children, as well as assisted suicide. Do we mitigate first-degree murder to a lesser charge if the killer showed “compassion” by killing the victim swiftly while sedated? Do we show leniency to rapists for drugging the victim and raping her while she’s passed out, or for using a condom? How asinine would that be?!
Think of children born with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, otherwise known as Congenital Analgesia. Are they any less worthy of their right to life, just because they are incapable of feeling pain? Do we allow abortions for them? The only way this Montana bill could possibly be any worse is if it had such an exception, or any other exceptions such as rape and incest – not that I wish to give them any ideas! So many of these same pro-life leaders already support Pain Capable bills with rape exceptions – as if we (children conceived in rape like me) don’t feel pain, or it’s just that we can go ahead and suffer for all they care. As soon as you compromise on principle, you’ve already lost. People need to understand that.
We must not support a dangerous bill like the Montana abortion anesthesia bill! Our rights cannot be linked to whether we feel pain, and we must not placate the concerns of mothers who might not otherwise obtain an abortion because of concerns about the baby feeling pain. I urge everyone to refrain from supporting such legislation, and move away from the whole pain argument as defining our humanity.
BIO: Rebecca Kiessling is an international pro-life speaker, writer and lawyer, having been conceived in rape and nearly aborted at two back-alley abortions, but legally protected by no-exceptions Michigan law. She’s the founder and president of Save The 1 and co-founder of Hope After Rape Conception
Right away, I felt ill to my stomach because, as far as I’m aware, this would be the first time in American history that a precedent would be set that it’s okay to kill your innocent victim as long as he or she doesn’t feel pain, or as the bill now stands – as long as those involved in the killing are told that the victim might feel pain. Just think of how far-reaching such a dangerous precedent could be extended: euthanasia of special-needs children, as well as assisted suicide. Do we mitigate first-degree murder to a lesser charge if the killer showed “compassion” by killing the victim swiftly while sedated? Do we show leniency to rapists for drugging the victim and raping her while she’s passed out, or for using a condom? How asinine would that be?!
For the last couple of years, I’ve
been warning others that the fetal pain bills could backfire and that it is dangerous
to suggest that our right to life is somehow linked to whether or not we feel
pain. In Gonzales v Carhart, the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case which upheld the
Congressional ban against Partial Birth Abortion (also called “intact D&E”,
the Court said that, “the
Act’s prohibition only applies to the delivery of ‘a living fetus.’ 18 U. S. C. §1531(b)(1)(A) (2000 ed., Supp.
IV). If the intact D&E procedure is truly necessary in some circumstances,
it appears likely an injection that kills the fetus is an alternative under the
Act that allows the doctor to perform the procedure.” Because of this chilling language, I’ve often
cautioned others that the same Court which suggested that you can still perform
a Partial Birth Abortion as long as you provide a lethal injection first, would
similarly respond to a Pain Capable Act by merely suggesting you provide
anesthesia first. And now a state
legislature is actually suggesting what I feared the Supreme Court would do!
What’s even more shocking to me now
is the fact that several pro-life activists have come out publicly in support
of the Montana anesthesia legislation, including Eric Scheidler, Jill Stanek and Fr. Frank Pavone – all of whom do great work for the pro-life movement, but
all of whom are dead wrong on this bill.
We cannot sanitize abortion. Can
you imagine rape victim advocacy groups pushing for a bill which would require
rapists to drug their victims first?
It’s lunacy!
I placed a personal phone call to
Priests for Life to discuss this bill, and I received a friendly voicemail
message back from Dr. Anthony Vento of Priests for Life, who explained that
they “support incremental legislation regardless of any exception” – which I
support incremental legislation as well, as long as it’s principled with no
exceptions – and that they felt that “from a standpoint of morality, it’s
immoral to take rights away from a person.
It is not immoral to add rights to one.”
PFL believes that informing the mother of the option of anesthesia is
adding rights to the preborn. He further
stated that they feel the bill does not give an incentive to an abortion, but
that the baby should not have to feel pain.
I took a day to ponder what he said
about adding rights to a person. Again,
does requiring a rapist to use the date rape drug or a condom add rights to a
rape victim? I would say not.
Something else which came to mind is
the 3/5 Compromise during the 1787 Constitutional Convention which counted
slaves as 3/5 of a person for determining a state’s population for purposes of
congressional representation and taxation.
That provision is still in the U.S. Constitution to this day – Article
1, Section 2, Paragraph 3, but was effectively nullified by the 13th
Amendment which made all persons free.
Interestingly, they didn’t want the word “slave” in the Constitution, so
they referred to free Persons vs. “other Persons” – slaves, who were only
counted as 3/5. In the battle to protect
preborn children, it’s the opposite, where they are given a dehumanizing name –
“fetus” – instead of being called “Persons.”
This “3/5 Compromise” is a shameful
part of American history. Arguably, it
“added rights” to slaves by recognizing them as “other Persons” within the
Constitution, although only being counted as 3/5 for apportionment, but having
them recognized as persons brought slaves nowhere closer to being free! In fact, it ensured their enslavement more by
increasing the stake of Southern slaveholders in Congress. Seven decades later, in the Dred Scott U.S.
Supreme Court decision, slaves were still not recognized even as “citizens”
under the U.S. Constitution, and so, had no right to sue in Federal Court. Likewise, in Roe v Wade, the Court pointed
out that preborn children have not been recognized as “persons in the whole
sense.” Most, if not all, of the
compromises involving slavery were major failures, and we can see clearly now
that the North should have never compromised at all. Can you imagine if the pro-life movement
supported a compromise bill to recognize the preborn as 3/5 of a person? That would be ludicrous! But under PFL’s standard, it would be “adding
rights.”
Dr. Vento from PFL also suggested
that the Montana legislation does not provide an incentive to abort. However, I wholeheartedly disagree. My friend, pro-life activist Abby Johnson
explains it this way: “Incremental
legislation is great, but we have to be careful which incremental measures we
support, and we certainly have to be careful when we make remarks praising
these measures. When I worked in the
Planned Parenthood clinic, the most frequently asked question I received was,
‘Will my baby feel this?’ We would ask them how that would play into their
decision. They would almost always say that they ‘wished there was a way to
make it so that the baby wouldn't feel any pain before it dies.’ It wasn't that they were going to change
their minds if the baby felt pain. I
personally believe, from my own experience in the clinic, that this will only
ease the conscience of the woman seeking an abortion. I'm not sure it's going to do what people think
it will.”
With
the anesthesia bill, I see significant parallels in the book “The Giver,” by
Lois Lowry, when the character Fiona describes her experience with being
trained to end the life of a baby in the manner in which the society deemed to
be humane:
“I
got to my assignment the next day. The
first thing I heard from my director was . . . ‘Today I will teach you to
release new-children,’ she said looking straight at me. I was shocked,
did I really have that much respect already???
I had only become a nurturer yesterday, and she wanted me to release a new-child! She put in one of my hands a small needle. I know new-children need needles for health,
but if he was being released wouldn't the people who were going to receive him
have a health needle for him? I looked around. There seemed to be no door to some magical
elsewhere that all elevens always whispered about when they thought of being
released. I looked back at my director as she instructed ‘pass me the needle.’
I handed her the needle slowly, wondering what I was supposed to
do. I watched as she talked to the new-child with a soft mother-like
voice. She then said ‘this will hurt at
first but in the end you won't feel any pain.’
What was that supposed to mean???
It didn't make any sense to me at the time. Slowly she injected the needle into the
new-child's head because his arm vein wasn't big enough. He started wailing and I didn't know what to
do. I looked back to my director and she
was looking at the new-child as if waiting for something to happen, and then it
did. In her arms the small new-child
slowly stopped crying and then he went limp.
He was dead. I stared in horror
at my director as she placed the small body in a white box and threw it down
the garbage chute. This would
be my job from now on! Killing
new-children! They weren't even old
enough to speak up for themselves! My
instructor then looked back at me and said ‘This is how people are
released. You must deal with it, and not
tell anybody.’ She looked at me, her
eyes held such certainty. It was
strange.”
This
Montana abortion anesthesia bill is every bit as strange. Just as the director in the Giver book was
desensitized and training Fiona to be, I foresee that this legislation will
actually have the net effect of doing the same and thereby increasing abortions
in Montana. In fact, I could see Montana
becoming the new late-term abortion capital of the United States because the
medical community and others who tend to bully women into getting late-term
abortions for various reasons will be able to tell these women not to worry –
that they can go to Montana to get their late-term abortions where they do them
humanely. That could become the new slogan for the
late-term abortion industry in Montana!
I
understand that Fr. Pavone and others honestly believe that this measure will
make people more aware of the fact that preborn children are capable of feeling
pain, but an anesthesia bill merely raises the issue, then resolves it – “unborn children feel pain? Offer anesthesia -- problem solved!”
In
my research on this issue, I found an article
in USA Today
written by an anesthesiologist calling for “a moratorium on the use of
anesthetics for lethal injection” of death row prisoners, and I was struck by
the parallels: “lethal injection created
an illusion of humane, professional execution.
But the executioners are not doctors, and it's been well established
that the executions themselves are not humane.”
This is the same with anesthesia abortions – they will give the illusion
that late-term abortions in Montana are “humane,” although sedation doesn’t
make abortion any more humane at all!
Dr. Joel Zivot points out that European pharmaceutical companies have
stopped selling certain products in the U.S. because they’re being used to
administer the death penalty. If a
pharmaceutical company is willing to take such a stand for convicted murderers
– losing significant revenue from U.S. sales, surely we can take a better stand
for pre-born children!
This
brings me to a brief discussion of why many Catholic pro-life leaders are
willing to compromise and to celebrate mediocrity – they improperly utilize
Evangelium Vitae 73, an encyclical of Pope John Paul II on abortion, which
states: “When it is not possible to
overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose
absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly
support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at
lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public
morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an
unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil
aspects.” First of all, this provision is only limited to an elected
official – not a priest, pro-life activist or voter, and it’s only to be if
it’s a deciding vote.
Secondly, as I pointed out in
my radio interview on the Catholic
Channel with Cardinal Dolan
on January 21st, in which he completely agreed, there is no way that
the Pope intended this provision to allow for the discrimination of an entire
class of persons. In fact, Cardinal
Dolan called it “preposterous” to suggest that EV 73 allows such
discrimination. But he even went a
little further, objecting to the premise of the Pain Capable Unborn Child
Protection Act, quoting from an excerpt from my philosophical abortion essay: “Does that make it okay to stab somebody in
the back when they’re sleeping, because they can’t feel pain?” Then he
declared, “Absolutely not -- that’s ridiculous!”Think of children born with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, otherwise known as Congenital Analgesia. Are they any less worthy of their right to life, just because they are incapable of feeling pain? Do we allow abortions for them? The only way this Montana bill could possibly be any worse is if it had such an exception, or any other exceptions such as rape and incest – not that I wish to give them any ideas! So many of these same pro-life leaders already support Pain Capable bills with rape exceptions – as if we (children conceived in rape like me) don’t feel pain, or it’s just that we can go ahead and suffer for all they care. As soon as you compromise on principle, you’ve already lost. People need to understand that.
We must not support a dangerous bill like the Montana abortion anesthesia bill! Our rights cannot be linked to whether we feel pain, and we must not placate the concerns of mothers who might not otherwise obtain an abortion because of concerns about the baby feeling pain. I urge everyone to refrain from supporting such legislation, and move away from the whole pain argument as defining our humanity.
BIO: Rebecca Kiessling is an international pro-life speaker, writer and lawyer, having been conceived in rape and nearly aborted at two back-alley abortions, but legally protected by no-exceptions Michigan law. She’s the founder and president of Save The 1 and co-founder of Hope After Rape Conception
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3 comments:
Once we start anesthetizing, it won't stop. It will continue on and on, and more and more why? BECAUSE WE ARE TAKING AWAY THE OBJECTIONS. Making it sanitized, easy, painless, making it the "right thing". Humans can adapt to endure almost anything, but in doing so, they sometimes perpetuate incredible evil. The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.
Excellent article. Deception seems to be epidemic. Proverbs 16:25 There is a way that seems right but in the end leads to destruction was never clearer than in this bill!!!
Brought to you courtesy of the "don't worry they won't feel a thing" movement.
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