|
An Extremist Bill
THE NEWS THAT abortions nationally have fallen to their lowest rate since 1976 should be something to cheer about. It means the pro-life movement has made some important inroads, and that more people are taking a fresh look at abortion and seeing not empowerment for women but the killing of a generation of babies. New York's Gov. Eliot Spitzer, however, has decided to swim against the tide, introducing a radical new bill that would make abortion more common than it already is. Worse, the euphemistically titled "Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act" would raise abortion to the level of a fundamental right, like freedom of speech, and would therefore prohibit virtually any restrictions at all. It's a bill that should be stopped in its tracks. The bill serves no purpose except to give Spitzer's pro-abortion backers their wish list. Kathleen M. Gallagher of the New York State Catholic Conference recently laid out the potential effects of the bill, and they're nightmarish indeed. The bill would ensure the availability of late-term abortions of fully formed infants, even if there were no threat to the woman's health, and would allow non-doctors to perform abortions. It would prohibit "discrimination" regarding the right to abortion to such an extent that Catholic hospitals could be forced to provide abortions or lose their license to operate. It would prohibit parental notification, expand the over-the-counter availability of the morning-after pill to children of any age, and force all insurers to cover abortion for any reason. All of this in a state that passed the most permissive abortion law in the country three years before the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision effectively legalized abortion in all 50 states; a state that even now has the highest abortion rate in the United States; a state whose largest city, New York, has so few restrictions on the practice that it's been called the "abortion capital of America." Spitzer's bill—which really has nothing to do with "reproductive health" or "privacy"—would change none of those practices. New York would still have the highest abortion rate in the country, it would still have more minors than anywhere else getting abortions, and it still wouldn't have a parental notification law. What would change, though, is that any "health-care professional," including, presumably, podiatrists and optometrists, would be permitted to perform abortions, and hospitals and clinics, including Catholic facilities, would have a hard time exercising their "right to choose" not to perform them. If this bill is brought before the State Legislature, it should be unequivocally rejected. New York deserves better than this.
|
|