A Missouri law banning abortions based on race, sex, or Down syndrome diagnosis went into effect today, but not before Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union tried to kill it.
The abortion lobby took Missouri to court for passing the Missouri Stands for the Unborn Act, which prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected and abortions based on the physical characteristics of an infant. A U.S. district judge agreed to block the law’s fetal heartbeat section, but kept its other restrictions intact.
“The various sections specifying prohibitions on abortions at various weeks prior to viability cannot be allowed to go into effect on Aug. 28, as scheduled,” U.S. District Judge Howard Sachs wrote in the 11-page opinion.
“However formulated, the legislation on its face conflicts with the Supreme Court ruling that neither legislative or judicial limits on abortion can be measured by specified weeks or development of a fetus; instead, ‘viability’ is the sole test for a State’s authority to prohibit abortions where there is no maternal health issue,” Sachs wrote.
Though the court’s decision is disappointing, it still offers an important victory for the pro-life movement. The law’s anti-discrimination provision are still in place, protecting the lives of unborn infants whose imperfections could factor into a mother’s decision to obtain an abortion.
Never has this been more important. After the Supreme Court refused to take up a case about a similar anti-discrimination abortion ban in Indiana last week, Justice Clarence Thomas warned that sex-specific, race-based, and disability-targeted abortions could move the U.S. one step closer to returning to the eugenics doctrine it has long rejected.
“Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement,” Thomas warned. “In other contexts, the Court has been zealous in vindicating the rights of people even potentially subjected to race, sex, and disability discrimination.”
Laws like Missouri’s, Indiana’s, and “other laws like it promote a state’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern day eugenics,” he continued.
Even the most vocal pro-choice advocates should agree with Thomas. But they won’t, for the same reason pro-choice politicians in Congress have refused to touch a bill that would protect the lives of infants born alive after botched abortions. Infanticide is already illegal, they argued, as is eugenics — even as some in their ranks (Gov. Ralph Northam, specifically) talk up infanticide as no big deal.
Our culture’s desensitization to abortion and its lack of respect for life, love, and family should force us to question whether these crimes really are impossible in the U.S. This is especially true as we see the Left enter a new stage of head-in-the-sand denial regarding the historical connection between overt racism and pro-abortion advocacy.
Laws can be overturned, the culture can change, and evil can return. And it will if we let it.
