Many commentators have perceived that the New York State law that legalizes infanticide when a child has survived a late-term abortion is a watershed. This was certainly buttressed by both the State’s celebratory lighting up of the Freedom Tower building after its passage and the subsequent public justification of infanticide by Virginia’s governor (a pediatrician, no less) and the quick moves in certain other states to following the Empire State’s lead. The irony could not have been starker: a building erected to show the country’s resolve to stand against terrorists who killed so many innocent people on 9/11 became the showcase of the new era heralding the legitimizing of killing a new class of innocent people.
In a certain sense, the New York law isn’t as great a departure from the post-1973 status quo as some think. For a long time after the Supreme Court decisions holding effectively that there is a constitutional right to abortion—wrapped in the softer-sounding language of a right of privacy—much public discussion claimed that the right extended only through the first trimester. That is why I’ve always referred not just to Roe v. Wade but at the same time to its companion case Doe v. Bolton, which said that the right extended throughout pregnancy if the woman’s health necessitated it—with “health” defined by the Court so broadly that virtually anything could fit into it. What the Court did, for all practical purposes, was to legalize abortion up to the moment of birth. Then, some years ago, we began to hear of “partial-birth” abortion—seemingly the latest of late-term abortions—where the child who is part of the way out of the birth canal can be killed. As we have heard increasingly about babies surviving attempted abortions—“abortion survivors”—the push has been on to legalize post-partum killing, at least—so far—by absolving the abortionist from the responsibility to do the least things to save the child’s life….read entire article, go to: crisismagazine.com/2019/legitimizing-the-killing-of-innocent-life
