OPINION:
Two years ago I wrote a piece to celebrate my first Mother’s Day as a father with a chance to celebrate my wife, and to give praise to the birth-mother of our adopted son. At the time we were anticipating the Dobbs decision that would unleash the will of the people to enact pro-life protections – the mark of the end of the beginning in a fight for a pro-life America that serves mothers and protects the unborn.
Now, leading up to Mother’s Day two years later, I will again shower my wife, and now mother of two adopted sons, with love. And again, I give praise to the now two strong, courageous and beautiful birthmothers who have blessed our family and chose adoption against the modern culture’s “solution” of abortion.
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That joy this year will have a shadow looming overhead though. Our nation is now almost exactly evenly split between states with strong laws in place to protect the unborn who provide vast services to new mothers, and those states that have “protected” abortion through the second and even third trimesters – in some states shielding doctors who mail dangerous abortion drugs illegally into other states from any liability from those who are hurt.
That reality – the dichotomy between some zip codes protecting life and some providing no protection for babies who can feel pain or survive outside the womb – hit me hard today while playing with my sons. One son has a birthmother in a state that protects babies once a heartbeat is detected. The other, our 9-month-old, has a birthmother from a state that has abortion on demand at virtually any point during pregnancy.
Was the life of my 9-month-old less valuable 10 months ago? Was his future and his impact on the world less needed or desirable simply because of the state his birthmother was from? When he was 6 weeks old with a beating heart, was his life less meaningful than his brothers’ at the same stage in life?
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The answer, if our political leaders abandon any measure of protection for the unborn at the federal level, is yes.
Without question the most pro-life president, the president who has had the most consequential impact on the pro-life movement, is President Donald Trump. No politician has ever succeeded in exposing the radical pro-abortion position of Democrats the way he did. His courage to stand by his judicial nominees and see their process through led to the Dobbs decision.
That decision gave a voice back to the American people to have their will be heard – but not just at the state level, at every level of government we have. Quoting the Dobbs decision, “ …the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” And from the concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “[Abortion] will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the States or Congress.”
The babies unprotected from abortion when they can feel pain in New York, California, Illinois and 21 other states are worthy of protection at the national level. They deserve political leaders to be their voice against extremism of the Democratic Party.
At 15 weeks, when a baby is capable of feeling pain, 72% of Americans have found consensus that they should be protected from late-term abortion. Standing boldly and championing protections for those babies stands in stark contrast to Joe Biden and the Democrats who seek to remove every protection for women and children from abortion, no matter how modest or common sense.
Our team at SBA Pro-Life America cannot, and will not, give up the fight to defeat Joe Biden and those Democrats, and prevent them from gaining control of Congress and the White House to enshrine late-term abortion as the law of the land nationally. We will not cede this fight to those who offer only ending the life of an unborn child as the solution for any woman in any circumstance.
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At the same time, pro-life candidates and elected leaders should not cede this national debate about protecting the most vulnerable to Joe Biden and the radical pro-abortion Democrats.
Pro-life officials must meet the Democrats where this fight is, countering a national abortion-on-demand policy with a widely popular protection for babies who feel pain. In the states and for the states, they must oppose extreme amendments to cement late-term abortion in state constitutions fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars of left-wing money designed to deceive voters.
We cannot accept a future America that allows an extreme abortion-on-demand vision of the Democrats to take hold. Neither can we accept an America where life is only valued depending on what zip code they are in. Both of my sons’ lives have value. Both bring joy (even with sticky, snotty, sometimes stinky messes, as every parent knows) everywhere they go. They, like the 50,000 babies aborted when they can feel pain each year, need a national defender of life to be their champion.
President Ronald Reagan once said, “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” Now is the time for great leadership, to get the people to do the great thing of protecting the unborn. That cannot be achieved by abandoning the cause or dismissing it from the national policy conversation.
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Stephen Billy is a North Carolina father of two who serves as vice president of state affairs for SBA Pro-Life America.
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