On Saturday, with most of the nation advised to stay at home, an ambulance was called to an abortion business in Granite City, Illinois, to transport a woman to the hospital following unknown complications. Business was booming that day, according to Operation Rescue, with cars from six states filling the parking lot and women “packed like sardines” in the waiting room. As the ambulance pulled away, the killing continued inside.
We live in a nation where many state governments consider abortion essential during a viral pandemic, so I was not shocked to learn on Monday that three federal judges ruled abortion bans in three states posed an “undue burden” to women and blocked the bans.
Nor was I surprised when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court and ruled that one of the states, Texas, can temporarily halt abortions as one response to the coronavirus pandemic.
This is a familiar routine in abortion jurisprudence.
Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion providers have been allowed to play by their own rules, often with a valuable assist from the federal judiciary. Women’s health and safety have been sacrificed at the altar of abortion access. Now all of us are in jeopardy as facilities like the one in Granite City act as hubs for spreading a highly contagious disease to multiple states.
If more than 2,000 women each day show up to abortion businesses, the nonpandemic normal in the United States, imagine how many thousands would then potentially be exposed to the virus, and then bring it home to their families and others they might encounter, even in their diminished daily lives.
Abortion mills are not known for their attention to hygiene, or for hiring well-qualified staff. Could coronavirus be lurking in these places? There is no doubt.
Several abortionists themselves have reported experiencing symptoms consistent with coronavirus. One abortionist exposed to the virus in California continued to perform abortions in Kansas. We know this, again, because Operation Rescue is keeping tabs.
Beyond exposure at abortion mills themselves, women sent to hospitals after botched abortions would then be exposed to many more potential carriers, and dwindling medical resources would be further depleted. The women also might be infected, thus exposing vital healthcare providers to the deadly virus.
But bowing to the wishes of Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups, three judges on the federal district level decided that common sense must take a back seat to abortion ideology. But their jurisprudential reasoning is flawed. Abortion has not been consistently regarded by the Supreme Court or other federal courts as a “fundamental right.” Even if it were, even a strict scrutiny analysis would permit the state to put carefully defined limits on that right in the midst of a national health emergency, much like the limits we see now with regard to freedom of worship and freedom of assembly.
But for these judges and the abortion mills they are helping, abortion is in some exalted category beyond even a “fundamental right.”
Everyone who pays attention to abortion is already familiar with the three judges who decided to put abortion access ahead of the health and safety of Americans.
Judge Lee Yeakel, appointed by former President George W. Bush for the Western District in Texas, blocked a state law in 2014 that required abortion doctors to have hospital admitting privileges and abortion facilities to follow the same rules as every other ambulatory surgery facility in the state. That law was challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt. The court in 2016 ruled in favor of the abortion providers.
When Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed the Human Life Protection Act in 2019, Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Alabama, appointed by former President Jimmy Carter, blocked the law a month before it was to be enacted. The law would have protected babies from abortion unless there was a serious health risk to the mother.
In the Southern District of Ohio, another Bush appointee, Judge Michael Barrett, last July blocked a law that would have protected babies from abortion once a heartbeat could be detected.
Abortion profiteers last week returned to the courtrooms of these three judges and insisted that abortion must go on. The judges agreed. Texas appealed to the 5th Circuit, which sided with the state. More courts will weigh in, and the case may make it to the U.S. Supreme Court if the virus doesn’t subside. This is the way the game is played, but the stakes are higher than ever this time out because it’s not just babies in the womb who are dying. More Americans succumb to this virus every day.
New York is the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., with more than 1,200 deaths as of this writing. But abortion, held as a sacred dogma both by Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, has been declared essential and is continuing unabated.
In some other states, including Illinois, where the ambulance arrived Saturday, abortion also has been declared essential. Women will continue to be exposed to the virus, and expose others, to access a procedure that is almost always elective.
The abortion industry and its political supporters continue to show their true colors, and sadly, those colors are quite inconsistent with everyone’s laudable efforts, in the midst of this pandemic, to save human lives.
Fr. Frank Pavone is national director of Priests for Life.
