Terrorists and Pro-Abortion Forces: One Culture of Death

In what the New York Times is calling ruefully the "second major victory" in this Congress for pro-life forces, the Senate approved a bill treating an unborn child as a separate crime victim when a pregnant woman is attacked. Pro-abortion Democrats, including presidential nominee John Kerry, voted against the measure for the obvious reason that it treats the unborn child as a legal person with legal rights. The pro-abortion activists are pulling their hairs and tearing their garments over this codification of what they view as blasphemy. The first major victory for pro-life forces in this Congress occurred when President Bush signed the ban on partial birth abortion. President Bush has already announced that he will sign this new bill to protect the unborn child as a crime victim.

The pro-abortion forces are right in this sense: this legislation is a step toward exposing the contradiction in our legal house in which the unborn child's obvious humanity and life are ignored. Just as a house divided against itself cannot stand, so a legal system in self-contradiction cannot stand. Either the unborn child is human and therefore has an inviolable right to life, or the unborn child is not human and is a mere commodity to be disposed of as adults see fit. The Republican Congress and Republican President have made their choice for life. John Kerry and the pro-abortion Democrats have said no to life. In my opinion, any informed Catholic still hesitating about whom to vote for in November should have his head or his theology examined.

This legislation is a major defeat for the culture of death. It would never happen under a presidency controlled by the Democratic Party, the proudly self-proclaimed Culture of Death party. So let there be no doubt: a vote for John Kerry is a vote for the Culture of Death.

Here is a crucial excerpt from the article:

The Senate's action was the second major victory in the Republican controlled Congress for the anti-abortion movement, which had sought this legislation since 1999. Last November, Mr. Bush signed into law a ban on the procedure that critics call partial-birth abortion. He strongly supported the latest legislation, referred to as the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, voted against the measure and was criticized by family members of crime victims on hand for the debate.

Source: Carl Hulse, "Senate Outlaws Injury to Fetus During Crime," N.Y. Times online (free reg'n required), Washington section, Mar. 26, 2004 (emphasis added).

Here is the detailed Democratic response:

Opponents of the proposal, while saying they sympathized with the desire to severely punish anyone who would attack pregnant women, said they were troubled by the definition of the "child in utero" covered under the bill as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and others said they believed that once that definition was written into federal law it would ultimately be used as an argument to overturn existing laws protecting abortion rights.

"This will be the first strike against all abortion in the United States of America," Ms. Feinstein said. She said a federal statute declaring that life begins at conception could ultimately lead to a court finding that "embryonic stem cell research becomes murder and abortion in the first trimester becomes murder as well."

"That's where this debate is taking us," Ms. Feinstein said, "that's the reason for this bill."

Source: Hulse, N.Y. Times (free reg'n required) (emphasis added).

Sen. Feinstein is right in this limited sense: this is indeed the first strike against abortion. The self-anointed party of social justice, the Democratic Party, is shocked and troubled that self-evident truth is codified by this bill. Indeed, the unborn child is "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb." That definition is absolutely undeniable, and it represents the most basic and fundamental form of social justice. What should really trouble the pro-abortion forces is that their own position requires them to deny this obvious truth.

All of which brings us back, surprisingly but relevantly, to the issue of the war of terror. The United States is at war over its survival. Our enemies wish to destroy us, not to "dialogue" with us. But the battlefields are not only in the deserts or mountain ranges of the Middle East or even at the site of the now destroyed World Trade Center. The battlefield for the survival of American civilization is also in the halls of Congress and our courts.

We are now seeing the absurd legal spectacle of a misguided atheist father obsessively pushing to remove the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. We see one major party, the Democratic Party, and its presidential nominee embracing the Culture of Death with gusto. In my view, these internal forces for moral chaos are more dangerous than any terrorist attack. The country will always recover even from the most terrible attack the terrorists can mount or imagine. But what is mortally dangerous is a country's moral self-destruction. The terrorists in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan are not blind. When they see a nation embracing its moral self-destruction, they see an omen of weakness spurring them on in their quest to destroy a weakening America. The message sent to the Middle Eastern terrorists when the courts and the Democrats seek to dismantle morality is a message of weakness. For the terrorists, as for criminals in general, weakness is a red flag. Weakness urges the terrorists never to give up their quest to destroy American civilization. These are times when fundamental issues are coming together in rapid and surprising ways. Let those who have eyes to see and ears to hear heed the signs of the times.