(National Review) This summer, Texas passed its own heartbeat law protecting preborn children after their […] heartbeat is detected during pregnancy.
Of course, it didn’t take long for Planned Parenthood, Whole Wom[a]n’s Health, and their allies across the state to file suit against Texas officials in response. The law will take effect on September 1, and the abortion lobby is desperate to quickly block it from going into effect.
Unlike other states’ heartbeat bills, the Texas Heartbeat Act is exclusively enforced through private lawsuits in state court. Because officials in Texas and across the country openly state they will refuse to enforce abortion laws, Texas placed enforcement in the hands of private citizens. Incidentally, without government enforcement, there is no constitutional violation.
The Texas Heartbeat Act accomplishes what other heartbeat laws sought to: It prohibits killing a preborn child with a heartbeat. A heartbeat is a clear and scientifically acknowledged indicator of life; in fact, we use the loss of a heartbeat as a sign of clinical death in hospitals. Ending a beating human heart ends someone. It ends a human. And human beings matter. Human beings are worthy of protection, and the importance of a growing human in the womb cannot be undermined in good conscience.
Typically, preborn heartbeats are detected between five and eight weeks of pregnancy. In Texas, 85 percent of abortions are performed during this stage of fetal development. That means, in practice, the new law will protect tens of thousands of preborn children every year in Texas from elimination by abortion.
Abortion advocates duplicitously twist abortion-law discussions, taking a legal measure designed to prevent killing innocent children and turning it into an attack on women. Planned Parenthood’s president went so far as to state in an interview that “cruelty is the point” of Texas’s Heartbeat Act. That irony should not be lost on you.
READ: Calling the Texas Heartbeat Act an abortion ‘bounty’ is dishonest rhetoric
In reality, abortion is cruel. And nothing is more venerable than protecting innocent and vulnerable human life from an unwarranted, unnecessary, and unjust death. A preborn child with a heartbeat is a living human being. Texas’s Heartbeat Act extends the same rights that human beings living outside the womb have to human beings living inside the womb.
There is a bizarre effort on the part of abortion clinics and activists to obscure the fact that the presence of a fetal heartbeat evinces life. In particular, abortion advocates love to cite the positively Orwellian doublespeak put out by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), an organization that describes a fetal heartbeat as an “electrically induced flickering of a portion of the fetal tissue that will become the heart.” “Electronically induced flickering” must be the newest “clump of cells” argument.
This is a common tactic of the pro-choice crowd, always shrouding abortion in unscientific euphemisms. They have conveniently rebranded abortion for decades. The self-proclaimed party of science has consistently rejected and undermined science, logic, and their consciences when it comes to life in the womb. And they’ve made billions this way. The reality is that the baby’s organs, from the brain and the heart to the lungs and the liver, develop continuously throughout pregnancy. The fact that they aren’t fully formed adult organs does not mean they aren’t organs at all. The human brain, in particular, doesn’t finish developing until well after a baby is born. According to ACOG, your infant daughter doesn’t have a brain; she has a portion of electrically stimulated tissue that will become a brain as she develops.
Planned Parenthood famously argues that abortion services make up 3 percent of the services it provides. Well, now is the time for the organization to focus on the other 97 percent. Rather than closing its doors, Planned Parenthood has an opportunity to join organizations such as Human Coalition to holistically support women. Instead of deadly temporal options such as abortion, these groups could come alongside women in crisis to give them permanent solutions such as the resources and assistance they need to lead healthy, stable lives alongside their children. Instead of profiteering off women, they could truly empower them. As of 2019, 2,700 organizations such as Human Coalition already do.
Or, Planned Parenthood can waste its time fighting legal battles so it can continue ending the lives of human children in the womb. Sadly, I think we all know which path the group will take. And I think we know what that says about how Planned Parenthood really views women, children, and the value of human life.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at National Review and is reprinted here with permission.
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