There were two victims in the horrific attack earlier this month on Jennifer Irigoyen in New York City. But the state’s law recognizes only one of them.
Anthony Hobson allegedly dragged his former girlfriend into the stairwell of her Queens apartment building and stabbed her in the stomach, neck and torso. Irigoyen was in the second trimester of her pregnancy. Neither she nor her unborn child survived.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown initially announced that Hobson would be charged with second-degree murder as well as second-degree abortion, reasonably enough, considering that he stands accused of killing both Irigoyen and her child. But then, the DA’s office dropped the abortion charge in light of the state’s radical new pro-abortion law.
…a woman’s right to choose should be paramount in this state. Because in this state where they choose to live, it matters, and it matters to the point that we’re going to be leading the country. And if you don’t like that, then there are plenty of other places that have different laws, and we can vote with our feet if we want to.
Sen. Todd Kaminsky
See for yourself stating at 1:33:58 of the Jan 22 NYS Senate Session:
Sen. Kaminsky’s statement while voting in favor of the RHA: “there are plenty of other places that have different laws.”
Ashley McGuire wrote the following opinion piece originally published by USA Today.
A standing ovation for abortion? That’s what New York’s Reproductive Health Act got in the Senate chamber when it passed last week. Lawmakers and bystanders stood and applauded a law that legalizes abortion all the way up until birth, for any reason.
The left may be celebrating the bill’s passage, but it is wildly out of step with American sentiment on the issue. American support for late-term abortion continues to decline; one poll last year found that a mere 13 percent of Americans support abortion all the way into the third trimester. And most Americans don’t think abortion is something to celebrate, or “shout” to borrow from the pro-choice lobby’s public relations campaign. A majority of Americans, in fact, say abortion is immoral.
I can only imagine then, that seeing Democrats vigorously applaud abortion for 7-pound babies makes most Americans queasy. The same goes for lighting up One World Trade Center pink.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs the Reproductive Health Act on Jan. 22, 2019. (Photo: Darren McGee/Office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo via AP)
But the bill did more than extend abortion up until labor pains begin. The bill drops the requirement that only doctors perform abortion and decriminalizes violence against children in the womb. Even if it’s by a woman’s thug boyfriend.
“Safe” … scratch that. Legal and rare? Scratch “rare,” too. In New York City, one in three babies are aborted.
In legalizing and then celebrating the brazen removal of protections for not just unborn children, wanted or unwanted, but women as well, New York dramatized something the left is increasingly struggling to hide: they are only interested in legal abortion, full stop. Safe and rare be darned.
Abortion extremism grows even as use fades out
Strangely enough, the left’s litany of extremism on abortion continues to grow as its political efficacy wanes. Just this month, Democratic leaders in Congress announced they would push to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of taxpayer funding for abortion, despite the fact that a solid majority of Americans support it. Co-chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., promised the “boldest pro-choice legislation in history” and called the new Congress an opportunity to unleash a “a new era of reproductive rights.”
It certainly is a new era, one in which the Democrats are further away from the American people on abortion than they’ve ever been in history, and one in which American views on abortion are more nuanced than ever before. A slight majority of Americans continue to support legal abortion, but primarily in the first trimester, and it’s something that makes them morally uneasy. Democrats who have been tossed out of office for their extremism on the issue can see this.
In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO, who voted against the 20-week ban on abortion, lamented the party’s emphasis on the issue, saying Democrats should “shut up” about abortion. “It was not an issue that was going to bring me more votes,” she said.
The left celebrates death itself
No doubt former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., who became known as “High Five Heidi” for her infamous high-five with Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer after voting against the 20-week ban, would agree.
Already, the four women who have entered the presidential race for the Democratic party from the U.S. Senate have made their abortion bonafides plain: All are in the New York school of abortion extremism. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., gets special kudos for her efforts to undermine crisis pregnancy centers in her home state while acting as attorney general, before the Supreme Court stepped in to protect their free speech rights.
What happened in New York last week is somber and tragic. But it was a teaching moment for us all in that it made plain the left’s position on a deeply divisive issue. As the bishop of Albany wrote in a letter to his parishioner, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, pleading him not to sign the bill, “Do not build this Death Star.”
The reality is that the left has moved past building Death Stars to celebrating death itself.
In 2018 the Charlotte-Lozier Institute published a 79 page report on the community impact of pregnancy centers. What does the New York State Legislature hope to add to their findings?
Why should New York taxpayers pay for a Division of Consumer Protection investigation of pregnancy centers, when the work has already been done?
What protection do the 2 million consumers of pregnancy center services nationally need? Do their medical communities need protection from $161 Million in free services offered annually? Or from the 7,500 medical professionals that have volunteered over 400,000 hours?
Doesn’t it make more sense for New York to perform a thorough investigation of abortionists (who regularly profit from vulnerable women in moments of crisis) than pregnancy centers who don’t charge women a dime?
Governor Cuomo and proponents of the Reproductive Health Act claim that it simply codifies the US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The RHA goes far beyond Roe, and beyond any abortion legislation any state has ever passed in creating a new fundamental human right of abortion and contraception.
The historical corollary to a fundamental human right is a duty. The move from access to right is a slippery slope—the move from an individual choice to a public duty is never far behind. That’s exactly what happened in China 40 years ago. That is not Roe, that’s the RHA.
Roe v. Wade made abortion a legal choice. The RHA would make abortion a legal responsibility. Unless we want to redefine what a ‘right’ is, we shouldn’t consider the RHA. Roe declared that the child in the womb is not a person. The RHA refuses to consider the child at all.
We’ve done this before. We’ve refused to consider the personhood of categories of people—blacks, Native Americans, the mentally disabled, Jews. The powerful can do whatever they want with the sub-human: slavery, land-grabbing, forced sterilization, genocide… abortion.
Under current New York State law, it is a criminal act to perform an abortion on a ‘viable’ child in the womb. (There is another time to discuss the atrocity of the popular, dehumanizing notion of ‘viability.’ Every person bears the image of God regardless of his or her ability to “survive.”) Governor Cuomo and advocates of the Reproductive Health Act want to completely remove all references to abortion from the penal code.
Kermit Gosnell. Heard of him? He ran an abortion mill near Philadelphia, PA where he routinely performed late term abortions for 30 years. He caused the death of Karnamaya Mongar in 2009. In 2010 his clinic was finally shut down after a raid for suspicious oxycodone prescriptions revealed barbaric conditions: blood on the floors and walls, bags of aborted babies, jars full of severed baby feet. A house of horrors. Gosnell is currently serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. His story inspired this feature-length documentary, released in theaters October 2018.
If New York’s Reproductive Health Act were law in Pennsylvania, Gosnell could not have been convicted of homicide.
Douglas Karpen of Houston is currently under investigation by the FBI after four former employees came forward with pictures and testimonies indicating that he killed babies born alive, snipping their spinal chords or “twisting their heads off their necks with his own bare hands.”
After getting kicked out of Florida, James Pendergraft was caught illegally operating a mobile abortion clinic out of his van in South Carolina. Local authorities found bloody surgical implements “with tissue still attached” when they pulled him over for a traffic violation.
There’s no shortage of stories of late term abortionists behaving badly. Shouldn’t we hold them to a higher standard? Shouldn’t these actions be criminal?
An extreme minority of people think that unrestricted abortion is a good idea. And yet, the New York legislature is expected to pass a bill in January, called the Reproductive Health Act, totally deregulating abortion.
Imagine your 12 year old daughter wants an appendectomy and there’s a bill permitting nurses to perform appendectomies without parental consent. Do you think that the State legislature knows best when it comes to your daughter’s health and life? Wouldn’t you question the quality of care your daughter would receive?
The Reproductive Health Act represents just this kind of irresponsible overreach…government getting between parents and their children and patients and their doctors. Further, it expands abortion to all nine months of pregnancy and allows babies who survive an abortion procedure to be killed.
All abortion procedures are invasive. Certain abortion procedures require surgery. Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act (RHA) is so radical that it reduces quality of care for women by allowing lower level medical providers to perform risky surgical procedures. Allowing non-physicians to provide surgery (say nothing of non-surgeon physicians) serves only to reduce quality of care for women, not enhance reproductive health.
According to the RHA a woman will be able to obtain an abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, representing higher-risk procedures, which have greater chance of complications, infection, and death. Fully licensed physicians in good standing are trained specifically for managing the condition of patients in potentially dangerous developments. Eliminating the requirement of physicians to perform these procedures increases the likelihood of life-altering and deadly complications for the woman.
Allowing non-physicians to perform an abortion ignores the overall health and well-being of the patient. Medicine is an art. It is the most humane of the humanities and most unscientific of the sciences. Physicians are trained to manage the entire scope of a patient’s health and well-being, employing this art. Lower-level providers are trained in technical skill, not the art of medicine. To employ lower-level providers in the performance of a single procedure virtually ignores the patient altogether. Allowing anyone to treat a patient around abortion alone disrespects the profession of medicine and the patient, treating her as an object to be manipulated—as a mechanic would a car.
Allowing non-physicians to perform surgery makes medicine what it is not. It reduces medicine to a set of impersonal skills to be applied to manipulate biochemical reactions. In so doing, it reduces the good purpose of medicine from the lofty heights of protecting the dignity of each individual to the meaninglessness of heartless, evidence-based, widget-turning, economically motivated population management. No thanks.
If legislators really cared about increasing the quality of care for women in reproductive health they would ensure that only board certified OB/GYNs in good standing could perform these complicated, risky procedures, instead of reducing the qualifications for practitioners.
David Lombardo of the Times Union Capitol Bureau sketched the rough outline of the New York Senate and Assembly legislative calendar, including the excerpt below:
In the Assembly’s third week (January 22 and 23), the chamber is planning on passing a package of women’s health bills, including the Reproductive Health Act and Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act, and education priorities, such as an overhaul of teacher evaluations and the DREAM Act.
Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, a Manhattan Democrat, announced last week that the goal in both house of the Legislature was to pass the RHA on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which would be Jan. 22.
