This week, the United States Senate, led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, will once again attempt to pass a national abortion law in response to the leaked Supreme Court draft that could overturn Roe v. Wade.
The legislation, being considered in the Senate, is called the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) and would legalize abortion nationwide up to birth, an extremely radical position even for the most pro-choice of Democrats.
From this standpoint, it almost appears as some form of retribution to the pro-life cause. Overturn Roe v. Wade? Fine, we’ll try to make it legal to abort any baby seconds before taking its first breath outside the womb.
The good news for morality and humanity everywhere is that even among some pro-choice Republican Senators, like Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, the bill doesn’t stand a chance of passing a cloture vote:
The vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, which has passed the House, is all but certain to fail, with just 49 senators expected to support the measure, below the 60-vote requirement to defeat a Republican filibuster.
Democratic leaders see the vote as an opportunity to stir up their base ahead of midterm elections in November in which their party faces stiff headwinds, from President Joe Biden’s negative approval ratings to voter concerns about inflation. Strategists in the party hope to make an impression on the sizable majority of Americans who want to uphold Roe v. Wade.
Among the 50 Democrats, only Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, opposes the bill. Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, of Pennsylvania, who has held anti-abortion views for years, came out in favor of the bill Tuesday, saying the circumstances have changed.
All 50 Republicans oppose the legislation. Two of them — Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska — say they support abortion rights and have proposed a narrower bill that includes carve-outs for religious or moral objections.
The narrow bill proposed by Murkowski and Collins is a non-starter for pro-abortion zealots. It’s either all or nothing. Abortion up to birth, or they’ll keep fighting for it. Compared to most European nations, the United States already has extremely liberal abortion laws. The average pro-choicer would find France, for example, far less hospitable for abortion “rights” than California.
Schumer knows the WHPA will fail, but he’s trying to ram it through just like the federal takeover of elections with the “voting rights” bill that failed back in January.
To make the point on how extreme the WHPA is, abortion would be legalized at any point up to birth for practically any reason. Find out you’re having a girl but you wanted a boy? No problem, come on in:
Bill Clinton’s artful framing was that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” but that’s ancient history to today’s Democrats. The WHPA would guarantee abortion access “at any point or points in time prior to fetal viability,” about 23 weeks. Women seeking such services could not be asked to “disclose the patient’s reason.” Some states have tried to prohibit sex-selective abortion, the practice usually of terminating a girl merely because a boy is desired. The WHPA appears to protect that choice.
After fetal viability, the WHPA would assure a right to an abortion whenever the physician’s “good-faith medical judgment” is that “the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.” What counts as “health”? This is sometimes defined to include mental, emotional or familial factors, a loophole that permits elective abortions, more or less, through all nine months of pregnancy.
The point of all this pro-abortion legislation is to make the guidelines squishy enough that any reason a woman offers is reason enough to terminate the life of the child through all nine months. There are no limits or timeframes when the government decides that the human being growing in the womb deserves protection. In other words, the right to life becomes mutable depending on circumstances.
The question then becomes how the federal government can decide that any child up to birth can be aborted, but if you murder a pregnant woman, you can be charged with two homicides? The laws and actual logic would be in conflict. Murdering a pregnant woman on her way to an abortion clinic would still create two homicide charges as the most extreme example to illustrate the tangled mess of legal questions Schumer’s federal law would create.
The most extreme views on abortion in the United States reside exclusively among left-wing progressive Democrats. Aborting a baby carried to 9 months of pregnancy minutes before birth is extreme no matter how it’s explained, yet that’s what Sen. Chuck Schumer is asking the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate to swallow.
Then again, Schumer has been one of the most ardent pro-abortion advocates among elected Democrats. It was him, if you recall, standing on the steps of the Supreme Court some time ago threatening the court to the point of being chastised by Chief Justice John Roberts back in March of 2020.
Abortion is a holy sacrament for Democrats, an issue that is non-negotiable to the point of advocating for what amounts to infanticide in some cases.
Once again, Democrats are far outside the mainstream and focused exclusively on issues that most voters are not putting at the top of the priority list for the midterms. It’s more of the same for a party that has lost its way and lacks any notion of tempered presidential leadership.
