By Judie Brown
In early May, the White House press secretary informed the nation that the recently passed North Carolina extreme abortion ban would “interfere with the doctor-patient relationship and make it even harder for women—especially those in the South—to access care.” Given the fact that the governor of that state vetoed the law, and the legislature overrode the veto, we wanted to see what the law actually banned.
The new law, SB 20, does not ban abortion; rather, it regulates the killing, providing for a laundry list of exceptions that render the new law deficient. But that does not matter to abortion extremists. They do not want a single abortion to be stopped for any reason. So while some celebrated the passage of the law, we take a moment to mourn all of the little children who will continue to die.
Some say that makes us the extremists.
We are not deterred, however, and move on to recent news reports concerning those who have made a profession of killing the innocent. Abortionist Warren Hern of Colorado was recently acknowledged as being an “abortion absolutist” mainly because he has been plying his trade for 50 years. As the news report tells us, he “stopped performing first-trimester abortions a few years ago; he saw too much need for later abortions, and his clinic couldn’t do it all.”
One would have to conclude that for Hern, the word extremist really does not go far enough. That is until we consider the story of Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess. Mother and daughter worked together in the plan to end the life of Celeste’s six-month-old preborn baby.
As the charges against these women mounted, Madison County attorney Joseph Smith commented that he had never seen a case like this before, saying, “Usually, abortions are performed in hospitals, and doctors are involved, and it’s not the type of stuff that occurred in this case.”
The extreme acts of this woman and her mother sent shock waves through the bodies of those of us who respect life, but the very fact that such atrocities occur in our nation should give us pause. As should the callous comments of an attorney who has no problem with babies being killed in hospitals where doctors do the deed.
Finally, there is the report concerning expectant mothers in Texas who are described as carrying “ill-fated pregnancies” that cannot be terminated due to the state’s abortion law. Texas’ heartbeat law is riddled with exceptions, but reporters do not dig into the details.
No wonder so many Americans have mixed feelings about abortion. Few news reports reveal whether or not a given law does much if anything to end abortion. Rather than clamoring for laws that protect innocent preborn children by acknowledging them as human beings, reporters have a vested interest in continuing abortion availability regardless of facts.
The macabre has become the norm, while those of us who struggle to protect these babies and their mothers from the terror, death, and grief of abortion are the ones labelled extremist.
While it pains me to write about the bloody battle, we must not get discouraged. Never forget these words of Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae: “As explicitly formulated, the precept ‘You shall not kill’ is strongly negative: it indicates the extreme limit which can never be exceeded. Implicitly, however, it encourages a positive attitude of absolute respect for life; it leads to the promotion of life and to progress along the way of a love which gives, receives and serves.”
And that, my friends, defines us as the extremists who travel along the way of love.
