New Congress Seeks to Ban Late-Term Abortions, While the President Threatens to Veto

This week marks the 42nd anniversary (January 22, 1973) of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in America.  I’m dedicating today’s and Wednesday’s blog postings to the some 56-million unborn fellow Americans who painfully suffered an agonizing death before taking their first breathe of life.

 

Marking this dreadful anniversary, the newly controlled Congress of Republican majority is taking its first step in sending pro-life legislation to the desk of President Obama.  According to Politico, the House has timed a vote on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to take place on January 22 … coinciding with the arrival of at least 300,000 pro-life Americans who are expected to brave the cold at the annual ‘March for Life’ in Washington, D.C.  If made into law, as many as 18,000 unborn children could be spared an abortion and granted life.  [The Congressional Budget Office and the Guttmacher Institute issued separate estimates that the bill would save between 10,000 and 15,000 unborn children a year.]

 

Trent Franks (AZ-R) and Marsha Blackburn (TN-R) introduced the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R.36) in the U.S. House of Representatives last week.  The bill institutes a national ban on all abortions on babies who are 20-weeks or older, in order to prevent fetal pain.  “More than 18,000 very late term abortions are performed every year on perfectly healthy unborn babies in America,” Franks said, adding that the babies are “torturously killed without even basic anesthesia.”  He said, “Many of them cry and scream as they die, but because it is amniotic fluid going over their vocal cords instead of air, we don’t hear them.”  Blackburn said the bill must become law, because Americans “have a moral obligation to end dangerous late-term abortions in order to protect women and these precious babies from criminals like Kermit Gosnell and others who prey on the most vulnerable in our society.  The United States is one of the few remaining countries in the world that allows abortion after 20-weeks.”

 

The Senate, under new Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of KY, is expected to vote on the measure in the spring.  Two Senate staffers told LifeSiteNews that a 20-week ban is expected to get through the Judiciary Committee and be a priority of the upper chamber’s Republican majority.  At least eight possible 2016 GOP presidential candidates have publicly stood with the ban.

 

President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, because it “shows contempt for women’s health and rights, the role doctors play in their patients’ health care decisions, and the Constitution.”  But whether he will need to is still an open question.  Republicans will need at least 6-Democrats to join them in supporting the bill, and possibly more if as many as 4-Republican Senators do not support the ban, to overcome a filibuster.

 

Polls show that a majority of Americans support the late-term ban … which includes exceptions for the life of the mother, rape, and incest.

 

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel