The Blumenthal 'Kill Them Later and Later' Bill

(BCN editor’s note. Mr. Blackwell’s been busy! This is the first of four Ken Blackwell columns for Thursday.)

Connecticut’s liberal Sen. Richard Blumenthal wants no one to have to worry about aborting unborn children late in pregnancy, very late. He favors abortion at any time prior to birth. It’s not clear yet whether he would vote to deny federal protection to newborns who survive an attempted abortion. Blumenthal was not in the Senate when that bill passed. Barack Obama was in the Illinois Senate when that state’s Infant Born-Alive Bill was killed. Then-Sen. Obama made sure that bill never got to the Governor’s desk.

We should know what Sen. Blumenthal wants. He wants no protections at all for mothers or their unborn children. No waiting periods. No ultra-sound images, especially no ultra-sound. Why?

As liberal columnist Joe Klein has written in TIME Magazine, “ultra-sound has made it impossible to deny that that thing in the womb is a human being.” Easy for you to say, Joe Klein! You are not running for public office and seeking campaign cash from liberal donors. Liberal politicians do the impossible every day. Richard Blumenthal denies that “that thing” is a human being. His bill treats that thing as nothing. It simply does not exist in his vocabulary. It is a choice, nothing more.

Warren Hern is not so squeamish about acknowledging what it is he does when he kills unborn children. He is pretty open about it. He famously told the newspaper of record, The New York Times, how he feels about what he does when he ends the life of unborn children late, very late, in pregnancy.

Here’s that memorable passage from the Times.

Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado, said abortion doctors ”are treated as a pariah by the medical community,” adding, ”At best, we are tolerated.”

He said a recent incident illustrated ”the fundamental rejection of what I do by what passes for the sympathetic medical community.” Dr. Hern said he called an old friend the day before New Year’s Eve, wanting to bring the friend a gift.

”He is one of my best friends, a medical colleague, who is strongly pro-choice and who has done abortions himself,” Dr. Hern said. ”I called him late Saturday afternoon and said I wanted to come over. He asked me where I was and I told him I At that point, Dr. Hern said, his friend quipped, ”Still killing babies this late in the afternoon?”

”It was like a knife in my gut,” Dr. Hern said. ”It really upset me. What it conveys is that no matter how supportive people may be, there still is a horror.

This long-ago story did not upset Warren Hern enough to make him stop killing unborn children. He has been targeting these defenseless human beings for more than a quarter of a century. Those insensitive comments by his fellow abortionist may have felt like a knife in the gut, but Hern has actually used his knife to slay thousands of innocents. And it has all been legal.

The horror that Hern says even fellow abortionists feel about what he does every day is called humanity. Even in the hardest of hearts, there is a remnant of humanity. It is that still small voice of conscience that Warren Hern has learned never to heed.

That Times article, from as long ago as 1990, shows that people continue to view the slaughter of innocents with horror. In the last four years, some 216 pro-life laws have been passed in the states. These pro-life laws are not “restrictions” as the media keeps saying, but protections. They are efforts by Americans’ elected representatives—women and men—to do what can be done for life under the unjust restrictions of Roe v. Wade.

These laws afford a measure of protection to unborn children and to their mothers and fathers. Overturning these laws—as Blumenthal’s bill would do—is another way of bringing us more Kermit Gosnell cases.

Gosnell ran a filthy abortion center in Philadelphia. Bloody, dirty, and dark, this facility victimized women and thousands of their unborn children. Gosnell was tried and convicted for “snipping” the spinal cords of children who were born alive and screaming after he had failed to end their life within their mothers’ wombs.

Pennsylvania has stronger protective laws on the books, but a succession of “pro-choice” governors—Tom Ridge (R) and Ed Rendell (D)—made sure that there would be no serious effort at enforcing even the most elementary standards of clinic cleanliness.

In Gosnell’s center, it was said to be “raining fetuses” and blood was all around. Women died because of his failure to take adequate care of them. Did the media call this a “war on women”? Not likely. They stayed away from the Gosnell trial in droves. Viewers of FOX were perhaps the only people in America to see on TV the rows of empty seats reserved for the press. “Nothing to see here, folks, just move on.”

So, now Richard Blumenthal wants to overturn hundreds of pro-life laws, protective laws, and open the way to more Herns and eventually to more Gosnells. The Blumenthal abortion-on-demand bill should be defeated in this Senate—and in any Senate.

The Blumenthal bill would have an especially damaging effect on minority mothers. Most of Gosnell’s victims were black and Hispanic. We have learned how Planned Barrenhood (Parenthood) targets minority communities. And in Harlem, 61% of black women’s pregnancies end in abortion. Blumenthal thinks that 61% is not enough.

Joe Klein was right: “That thing in the womb is a human being.” Or, more to the point, that thing in the womb is a child.

Photo credit: dalurton1 (Flickr Commons)

Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union, and on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.