By MIKE MANNO
Gauging reader response, the left’s doubling down on the abortion war against children and the bishops’ milquetoast response have lit a fire under the pews. And I hope to pour a little gasoline on it today by doing something we were never permitted to do from the pulpit — for good reason: too many children there.
So don’t give your paper to the kids — Promise! Because I’m going to describe what we’ve been talking about that is the subject of all the new pro-abortion legislation.
Let’s get some terms straight. Dilation and evacuation is a dismemberment abortion and is usually used between 15 and 18 weeks. It seems to be the abortionists’ preferred method of thinning the population. Dilation and extraction refers to what we loosely refer to as partial-birth abortion. Both occur after the baby’s heart has started to beat and the child would be viable outside of the womb.
Now here’s the part we can’t say in front of the kids:
This is a description of a dismemberment abortion contained in an amici brief filed on behalf of 21 states seeking an appeal of a lower court ruling against an Alabama law prohibiting the same. It is based on the testimony of the infamous late-term abortionist, Leroy Carhart:
“The doctor first dilates the pregnant woman’s cervix just enough to insert instruments, such as a forceps, into the uterus. The doctor then seizes parts of the fetus’ body, such as a foot or hand, and pulls those parts out of the uterus and into the vagina. . . . The fetus does not die instantly, but stays alive, heart beating, while the doctor repeats the process, tearing off one limb at a time. In the end the fetus bleeds to death or dies from the trauma, and the doctor is left with a tray full of pieces.”
The dilation and extraction, or partial-birth abortion, was described by a nurse witness for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and quoted by the Supreme Court, as follows:
“Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms — everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus….The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startled reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.
“The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp….He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.”
Now, I do not know why, in any civilized nation, the above procedures would be used, much less legal. What I have just described comes straight from the bowels of Hell and anyone who defends or legalizes these procedures has cut themselves off from the Body of Christ.
Yet Catholic politician after Catholic politician, just as we see with the New York governor, not only defend the practice but use the power of their offices to expand it. And Catholic bishop after Catholic bishop, while articulating the right words, will do nothing against these (so-called) Catholic politicians, but will defend their own rationalization as to why they cannot excommunicate, or apply other ecclesiastical penalties, to rebuke the defenders of these gruesome procedures.
What is the laity to think? Who can stop this Satanic evil? One would hope the Church, but a cowardly leadership, trapped by its own self-imposed impotence, has left the Church ineffective.
And this infanticide is spreading. Vermont is considering a bill that will “recognize as a fundamental right the freedom of reproductive choice,” that its supporters want to add to the state constitution. The bill states that “a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus shall not have independent rights…no state or local law enforcement shall prosecute any individual for inducing, performing, or attempting to induce or perform the individual’s own abortion.”
Additionally, LiveAction reports that there is nothing in the bill that requires any assistance to a baby born after a failed abortion.
Nationally, a federal bill to protect babies born alive after a botched abortion is being blocked by the Democrats — many of them Catholic.
In New Mexico, proposed legislation removes sections of the current law that criminalizes abortion as well as a current provision that protects hospitals from being forced to admit women for an abortion or a doctor from performing an abortion.
Thus doctors, nurses, and hospitals would be denied the right not to participate in an abortion. It also legalizes, as the new New York law does, abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has indicated she will sign the bill if it comes to her.
Alabama has a law prohibiting dismemberment abortions that has been challenged. The lower courts ruled against the law, and Alabama has appealed to the Supreme Court. Louisiana and twenty other states have joined in an amici brief supporting Alabama’s petition for certiorari.
There is one problem, however, with the Alabama law. It only outlaws dismemberment abortions while the baby is still alive. If the abortionists actually kill the baby first, dismemberment is allowed to remove fetal parts from the mother’s womb. The thinking behind the law was that a straight ban on dismemberment abortions would be struck down so the bill as drafted would only apply to a certain method of killing, replacing death by being torn limb from limb with death by injection.
As a lawyer, I can understand the distinction and the idea that the only way to attack legalized abortion is to chip away at it bit by bit, which has been a successful legal strategy. However, it still strikes me as a mercy killing in the womb.
I think George Weigel, writing in First Things this month, sums up the situation about as well as anyone. Calling the new abortion momentum “legal butchery of innocent children,” he wrote:
“Andrew Cuomo, and all the pro-‘choice’ politicians who self-identify as Catholics, bespeak a massive failure of catechesis and Christian formation in the Church in the United States. In the face of that failure, the people of the Church, ordained and lay, are called to a stringent examination of conscience.
“When bishops fail to declare, in the strongest and clearest terms, that support for immoral bills such as the New York [law] puts the legislator or executive in a gravely impaired position within the communion of the Church, their dereliction of duty compounds that catechetical failure.
“When lay Catholics dodge the abortion issue in conversation because it’s too uncomfortable or might make them look ‘conservative’ or ‘anti-feminist,’ they betray the Gospel and amplify the catechetical failures of the past and present.
“Moral depravity stalks the land. Calling it such is deemed ‘extremist’ by United States senators. We all have work to do. And we all must summon the courage to do it.”
Weigel is right and our weak and discredited leadership is wrong. The bishops would do well to listen to him. Too bad he’s not a bishop; there are more than a few places he’d be needed.
(You can contact Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com.)
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