Life Advocacy Briefing

Texas Heartbeat Law Back in Force

IT DID NOT TAKE MANY DAYS for the 5^th US Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the preliminary injunction which US District Judge Robert Pitman had slapped on the unique Texas Heartbeat Abortion Law, reinstating the law which took effect Sept. 1 and has been saving the lives of unborn babies whose beating heart can be detected – often around six weeks of gestation.

Just hours after Texas Atty. General Ken Paxton (R) filed an appeal from the Pitman injunction, the 5^th Circuit granted “an administrative stay,” reports Ashley Sadler for LifeSiteNew.com (LSN), “that will allow enforcement of the Heartbeat Act to go forward.”

Closing the Barn Door

THE FIGHT OVER THE TEXAS ‘HEARTBEAT’ LAW is raging in many corners. One that has not received much coverage was the focus of a Sept. 27 report by Operation Rescue (OR) vice president Cheryl Sullenger, who notes, “When the Texas Heartbeat Act went into effect on Sept. 1, … the pro-abortion fanatics immediately implemented a back-up plan that was long in the works.

“That back-up plan involved mailing abortion-inducing drugs to women in Texas,” she reports, “primarily from overseas. One example is that of [notorious] European abortionist, Rebecca Gomperts, who vowed to continue shipping abortion pills to women in Texas through her Aid Access organization.” Long-time readers of Life Advocacy Briefing might recall the name Rebecca Gomperts as the abortion fanatic who anchored an abortion ship in harbors of European countries which limit abortions.

But it appears Texas pro-life lawmakers were not caught taking a siesta in the warmth of Heartbeat success.

In late September, reports Mrs. Sullenger, “Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new law, SB-4, that would put an end to the mail delivery of abortion drugs. It is set to take effect on Dec. 2, 2021.

“‘The Texas Legislature understood,’” said OR president Troy Newman, quoted in the Sullenger report, “‘that the abortion cartel would fall back on the mail delivery of abortion drugs to bypass the Heartbeat Act and took action to prevent that scheme. Their forward thinking,’” he said, “‘will save innocent lives.’”

Quoting the new law in the Sullenger report, “‘A manufacturer, supplier, physician or any other person may not provide to a patient any abortion-inducing drug by courier, delivery or mail service.’

“The law also,” notes OR, “does the following:

• Reduces the limit the abortion drugs can be used from 10 weeks gestation to seven weeks (49 days);

• Requires the abortionist to examine women in person to rule out ectopic pregnancies or other contraindications;

• Requires abortionists to report complications/adverse effects experienced by women who take the Mifeprex, Misoprostol [RU-486] abortion cocktail or the drug methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug that is sometimes used to induce abortions.

“Violation of the law by ‘any person’ is a criminal felony,” notes Ms. Sullenger, “but excludes women who take the abortion drugs from prosecution.”

Standing on Principle

IN A REFRESHING MOVE, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) told Fox News host Chris Wallace in late September that he would not sign legislation to weaken his state’s unique “Heartbeat Abortion Act” by adding a loophole for the pre-birth killing of babies who were conceived via the commission of a criminal sex act.

The weaselly “exception” has been introduced by GOP State Rep. Lyle Larson, who, according to LifeSiteNews.com’s Calvin Freiburger, voted for the Heartbeat Law but has now claimed in a letter to the governor, notes Mr. Freiburger, that “it was a ‘common sense fix’ to recognize the ‘reality’ that ‘none of us have the power to prevent rape in this state.’ He also cited feedback from constituents across the political spectrum who supposedly demanded the language” with no thought for the human nature of an unborn baby, regardless of the circumstances of conception.

Noting the bill’s introduction, the Fox News host asked Gov. Abbott, reports Mr. Freiburger, “‘If that came to your desk, will you sign it or not?’” Responded the governor: “‘Well, we’ve got to go back to what the reason was why the law was passed in the first place. And the goal is to protect the lives of every child with a heartbeat,’ [Gov.] Abbott responded. When pressed again,” writes Mr. Freiburger, “[Mr.] Abbott added, ‘You’re making a hypothetical that’s not going to happen, because that bill is not going to reach my desk. But second, the goal is to protect every child with a heartbeat.’”

Texas Right to Life is standing with the governor on this one. The group’s legislative director John Seago, notes Mr. Freiburger, “said the group ‘strongly opposes’ [Rep.] Larson’s bill, because ‘creating loopholes and exceptions, where not all unborn children would be treated equally, violates our pro-life principles’ and would undermine the law’s purpose ‘to protect the most vulnerable among us from the violence of elective abortion.’”

U.N. ‘Human Rights’ Outfit Advises U.S. Supreme Court

A ‘FRIEND-of-the-COURT BRIEF’ HAS BEEN FILED with the US Supreme Court by “a group of UN human rights experts,” reports Stefano Gennarini for the Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam), a pro-life public affairs organization which focuses chiefly on the United Nations.

The latest UN intervention in US affairs comes in the Supreme Court’s deliberation of the lawsuit challenging Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, a case which the high court will hear in December and on which the jurists are expected to act by next summer.

The UN’s amicus brief “told the US Supreme Court,” writes Mr. Gennarini, a ruling favorable to the duly enacted law of Mississippi “‘would contradict human rights law by overturning its established constitutional protections for abortion access,’ the experts say in their brief,” reports C-Fam. “Abortion is ‘necessary’ for women’s autonomy, equality and non-discrimination,’ they argue.”

So much for a claim to concern for human rights.

Lead author of the brief, notes Mr. Gennarini, “is controversial South African abortionist Tlaleng Mofokeny, who, following her UN appointment in 2019, came under scrutiny by anti-trafficking and child protection organizations for her promotion of legal prostitution as ‘sex work’ for girls.”

Apparently, the endorsers of this international intervention in US affairs were careful – though using their UN credentials – to note that the brief and its opinions were not somehow authorized by the UN or its official bodies. That’s nice.

In the Courts

ARIZONA’s NEW LAW BARRING DISCRIMINATION-BASED ABORTIONS has been suspended by US District Judge Douglas Rayes, reports Dave Andrusko, editor of National Right to Life News Today. The state already has a statute outlawing abortions based on such prejudicial factors as race and sex; the new law, which was just hours from taking effect when hit with the temporary restraining order, adds genetic anomalies such as Down syndrome to its protective provisions. Judge Rayes, an Obama appointee, characterized the new law, notes Mr. Andrusko, as “‘a substantial obstacle in the paths of women who have chosen to terminate their pre-viability pregnancies.’”

The Bottom Line

Oct. 8, 2021, transcript of Fox News Primetime monologue by Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist

             For the past half-century, the United States of America has dominated a category no one would ever want to own. We have, as a nation, one of the most radical abortion regimes in the world.

             It might surprise you to know this. You certainly won’t hear it from anyone on any other network. But that supposedly extreme Mississippi law headed for the Supreme Court, which would block most abortions after 15 weeks, would be right at home in Europe – when all those nations the Left wants to emulate in other areas of policy, like France and Sweden, ban abortion. In fact, all the [27] countries you see on your screen ban elective abortion at 12 weeks. None of them have what America effectively has in many states – abortion up to the point of birth. For that, you have to look at our moral equals, nations like China or North Korea.

             Why is it that America has persisted in this extreme regime even as the rest of the world woke up to the moral reality of what abortion does to families and societies? It’s a complicated story, but also very simple, really: Many of us have been willing to look the other way, and a vast industry of powerful forces in our country have worked very hard to make sure that we do.

             Understand, there is no more important single issue today to the Left than the issue of abortion. It is an item of faith they are wedded to stronger than any religious conviction. If you’ve ever been taken aback by the vitriol, violence and false accusations leveled against any who challenge abortion, you’ll know what I’m talking about – the kind that makes a young woman spit on an elderly priest. It’s safer to attempt sacrilege in a cathedral than an abortion rally.

             To criticize the abortion regime is to place yourself at odds not just with the most powerful activist groups and donors, it is to take on the woke corporatists and Hollywood and our corrupt media and big tech and, well, just about everybody with power in America today.

             Since the moment Roe versus Wade short-circuited the legal conversation about abortion, the pro-abortion Left has worked to gaslight the country into believing things that just aren’t true. They pretended they wanted abortions to be rare, they claimed they didn’t profit from them, they denied they sold organs, they refused to acknowledge the science of what we know about the development of unborn babies – utterly unknown to the authors of Roe, by the way – and they ignored the terrible and tragic impact on America’s poorest and most vulnerable families, and on the black community in particular; more black babies are aborted than are born in New York City every year. That’s fine with them.

             They also did everything they could to build up men like Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, because the abortion agenda is always more important. Why do you think Joe Biden flipped on the Hyde Amendment and taxpayer-funded abortions after an entire career of saying he believed the opposite? Every Sunday, his head bowed in his church? He knows who runs the left. He wanted to be president, and he was willing to make a deal to do it.

             And in every aspect of this effort, the pro-abortion Left has had the strong advocacy of a media that has displayed more corruption on this topic than perhaps any other. If you watch ABC, NBC or CBS today, pro-life women simply do not exist. 

             The media’s coverage of this issue is indistinguishable from Planned Parenthood press releases, and the journalists who cover it are universally not just pro-choice but obviously pro-abortion.

             But now, at long last, something is happening. The energy in the pro-life movement is like nothing I’ve seen before. Abortion is no longer accepted as an unobjectionable good. The “shout your abortion” movement, where women are encouraged by the abortion lobby to boast about killing their children, comes across as desperate and sad. Decades of ultrasound pictures on refrigerators and women brave enough to talk about miscarriage and loss have a way of changing minds. When Iceland says they’ve “eradicated” Down syndrome, good people cringe, because we know what that really means. 

             Man with Down Syndrome at a hearing: It begins with, I am a man. See me as a human being, not a birth defect, not a syndrome. I don’t need to be eradicated. I don’t need to be cured.

             And when naive leftists regularly suggest that if pro-lifers like children so much, maybe we should force the dads to pay child support for unborn babies, our response is: Your terms are acceptable.

             There is today renewed hope, among those who believe every unborn baby has a right to life, that the Supreme Court may at long last re-open this significant question for us to decide, as citizens and states, instead of leaving the deepest moral question of life and death to nine people in robes.

             … Much of the discussion around abortion is about the law. But there’s another law I want you to consider as you listen [to the program’s guests], and that is the law written on your hearts.

             Back in 1933, long before Roe, Whittaker Chambers was working as a Soviet agent when his wife found out she was pregnant. Despite the initial joy, they both knew that as Communist agents, such things were not possible. His wife went to see a doctor to make arrangements. When she came back, she was quiet, noncommittal – and it slowly dawned on Chambers that she wanted to keep the child. He asked her. As he writes in his autobiography Witness: “My wife came over to me, took my hands and burst into tears. ‘Dear heart,’ she said in a pleading voice, ‘we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.’ 

             “A wild joy swept me. Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and its theories, the wars and revolutions of the 20^th century, crumbled at the touch of the child.”

             What we are discussing tonight is the most fundamental question for us: whether the unborn lives that take root here in America are unique persons, with the right to draw breath and blossom, or whether they are non-persons, “lives unworthy of life,” “human weeds” as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger called them, whose destruction is a public good.

             The Mishnah tells us that to destroy a life is to destroy a whole world – the world as it would have been with that life in it. Look to the law written on your heart. You know this to be true.

Devoted Convert

Oct. 13, 2021, Washington Update commentary by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins

             Joe Biden may be the Left’s puppet on a lot of things, but abortion isn’t one of them. In the last two years, the one-time March-for-Lifer has become a true believer [not just a puppet] in the fringe wing of his party where destroying babies in the womb is concerned. His DOJ (when it isn’t trying to prosecute parents for speaking up at school board meetings) has been frantically fighting to stop Texas’s pro-life law from taking effect – with almost eerie determination.

             In this game of legal ping-pong, the Biden Administration has been angrily firing off briefs any time a court has agreed to let the law take effect. The latest chapter in this whole drama happened over the weekend, when the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily lifted a judge’s ban on the law while the two sides slug it out in court. The Biden Justice Dept. was furious, insisting that the state’s decision to ban abortion at six weeks is “obvious[ly] unconstitutional” and, as such, shouldn’t be allowed to enforce the law while the lawsuit moves forward. 

             “If Texas’s scheme is permissible, no constitutional right is safe from state-sanctioned sabotage of this kind,” the Justice Dept. told the judges on the 5^th Circuit. “Partisans of one stripe or another might cheer these outcomes, but they should horrify anyone committed to the principle that this diverse nation is bound by one Constitution.” Of course, that’s tame compared [with] some of the Left’s other beefs with the Texas law – like the hardships endured by “pregnant men.”

             In USA Today, writers bemoaned the new and allegedly unjust challenges that Texas’s 6-week abortion limit puts on people who identify as transgender. In one of the craziest arguments for dismantling the law, extremists argue, “Getting an abortion while trans was always hard. In Texas, a new law puts outsized burdens on them.” Like everyone else who stumbled across the story, Media Research Center’s Matt Philbin almost didn’t believe it. “A hearty congratulations to Texas ‘trans men and non-binary people’ for really upping their victimhood game.”

             Meanwhile, the real victims – innocent unborn children – continue to be the object of Biden’s obsession, despite his church leaders’ disgust. If he claims to be a devout Catholic, Archbishop Joseph Naumann fired back at the President, “I would urge him to act like one … .” And yet, eight months into this killing culture, Biden’s pro-abortion fixation rivals that of even Barack Obama. Nothing, not even the overwhelming opinion of the country he’s leading, seems to dissuade this President. Biden, who’s “far from governing as a ‘personally pro-life politician,’” National Review Online’s editors note, “is everything pro-abortion activists could have hoped … .” And everything God-fearing Americans must stand against.