In remarks made to the Hispanic Caucus this week, Vice President Kamala Harris took aim at pro-life laws after media reports attempted to blame the abortion pill-related deaths of two women on Georgia’s pro-life law — a claim which Live Action News and others have thoroughly debunked.
“Many of these Trump abortions bans that make no exception for rape or incest, it’s immoral. It’s immoral,” Harris said, according to a White House transcript. She then explained: “So, imagine if [a woman seeking an abortion] is a working woman — understand that the majority of women who seek abortion […] are mothers — understand what that means for her. So, she’s got to now travel to another state. […] She has to leave her home to go to a airport, stand in a TSA line — like, think about this. […] I always say to my team, especially the young people I mentor, on any public policy, you have to ask, ‘How is this going to affect a real person?’ Ask how it would affect real people. Go through the details.”
But there is one person affected the most by abortion laws who is often deliberately overlooked: the preborn child.
Laws may protect preborn children only after a certain point in gestation (20 or 24 weeks, for example). Others protect them after six weeks, or 12 weeks, or after a certain developmental marker like a detectable heartbeat. Other laws don’t protect preborn children from being killed by abortion for any reason, at any time — nine states plus Washington, D.C. currently do not place any restrictions on abortion.
This means that a baby in those jurisdictions can be killed by chemical starvation and explusion, suction and shredding, disarticulation and exsanguination, or by lethal injection — depending on their gestational age. Let’s take VP Harris’ advice and “go through the details” in this video below:
Why does this matter? Because a preborn child is a living human organism from the moment of fertilization. From the very start, this organism has his or her own unmistakably human DNA that will determine things like eye color, hair color, sex, ethnicity, and more. The baby at the earliest stages of development meets every scientific criteria for being an individual human organism, although pro-abortion media outlets would like to deny this inconvenient fact. A preborn baby, from the earliest stages, is a person, and in fact the person most intimately affected by abortion laws.
In a state-of-the-art animation endorsed by OBGYNs and other medical professionals, Baby Olivia provides a “window to the womb” and clearly shows the humanity of a developing baby. The animation contains medical facts and videos from the Endowment for Human Development (EHD), an organization that proclaims itself “neutral” on public policy and bioethical issues.
So how does a law protecting preborn children affect real people, real babies? Let’s go through the details.
Plenty of research, including research released after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, shows that laws protecting preborn children lead to a decrease in abortions. Historical data bears this out as well.
The Hyde Amendment, which disallows taxpayers dollars from funding abortions, is credited with saving millions of lives. Abortion advocates want to end the Hyde Amendment because they know that this would enable some women to obtain abortions who might be disincentivized from doing so now, thus increasing the number of abortions overall — and specifically, killing more of the children of financially disadvantaged women.
Women seeking abortions often face a tremendous amount of pressure by people who advocate for abortions – sometimes in the form of their domestic partners, employers, or even misguided doctors. But even the unreliable Turnaway Study showed that 96% of women who sought abortions and couldn’t get one no longer wished they could have had an abortion after a handful of years had passed.
And it’s no wonder, too, because induced abortion is a violent and medically unnecessary procedure that intentionally ends a human life – whether by starvation from vital nutrients, by suction, dismemberment, or by stopping a baby’s heart in utero via a lethal injection before delivery. Later abortions of viable babies exist; they are not just delivery, but purposefully end the baby’s life. The desired outcome of every induced abortion is the death of the baby, and the point of an abortion is to end a human life.
So how do pro-life laws affect real people? By saving human lives.
