Under the AcaciaBy Father Seán Coyle
Because of a decision of the US Supreme Court in 1973, more than 9,000,000 Black Americans were denied a vote in the recent elections in the USA. These are the Black children aborted between 1973 and 1990 who would have been of voting age on November 4. 37 percent of abortions in the USA are of Black children even though Black Americans constitute only 13.4 percent of the overall population.
22 percent of abortions are of the children of white women and 34 percent of Hispanics and 8 percent to women of other races. These are the statistics of the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute Alan F. Guttmacher was president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
On July 17, 2007, Senator Obama addressed a Planned Parenthood Action Fund meeting. He articulated what he saw as the most important issue in the presidential election: “With one more vacancy on the (Supreme) Court, we could be looking at a majority hostile to a woman’s fundamental right to choose for the first time since Roe versus Wade and that is what is at stake in this election.” He spoke of his ongoing efforts to keep abortion legal: “I have worked on these issues for decades now. I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law. Not simply as a case about privacy but as part of the broader struggle for women’s equality.”
In answer to the question, “What would you do at the federal level not only to ensure access to abortion but to make sure that the judicial nominees that you will inevitably be able to pick are true to the core tenets of Roe v. Wade?” Mr. Obama said, “Well, the first thing I’d do as president is, is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.”
The website of Priests for Life, says that the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) goes beyond Roe v. Wade. “It would establish abortion on demand with no restrictions whatsoever as the law of all 50 states.
“FOCA, which has been introduced in Congress since the 1990s but is now regaining attention, would wipe out all state laws on abortion, including parental notification or consent acts, public funding restrictions, 24-hour waiting period requirements, and women’s right to know measures, whereby a woman must be told of the risks caused by abortion and about the development of her unborn child. If the next Congress has a pro-abortion majority, a pro-abortion president could sign FOCA into law, eliminating 35 years of laws that have reduced the number of abortions in the United States.”
Priests for Life also points out that “a pro-abortion Congress and a pro-abortion President could repeal the federal ban on partial-birth abortion passed and signed into law by President Bush in 2003 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007. Earlier versions were either vetoed by President Clinton or struck down by the Supreme Court.” President George W. Bush’s two appointees, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, Jr., and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, were among the five who voted against four to uphold the ban on partial-birth abortion, which is really infanticide, as the baby is killed during the actual process of birth.
It is generally agreed that George W. Bush hasn’t been one of the greater presidents in the history of the USA but he has left the potential legacy of a Supreme Court that could overrule the utterly evil Roe v. Wade decision. Obama appointees – and he almost certainly will have at least one, since Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is 89 – could bring the USA further back into the Dark Ages for a generation or two.
The recently passed Abortion Law Reform Act of the State of Victoria, Australia, in the words of Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart, “requires health professionals with a conscientious objection to abortion to refer patients seeking an abortion to other health professionals who do not have such objections. It also requires health professionals with a conscientious objection to abortion to perform an abortion in whatever is deemed an ‘emergency’”. In other words, legislators chose to deny doctors, nurses and pharmacists the choice not to be involved in killing without becoming criminals. It is a crime in Victoria to dock – “cut” - a dog’s tail and now a crime for a doctor or nurse not to be involved in an abortion in certain circumstances.
The UK recently passed a law allowing the use of hybrid human-animal embryos for research.
The USA, the UK and Australia are three countries with a Christian tradition but that have become aggressively secular and anti-life, though politicians in the USA invoke God on their side, whatever it is, while, in the words of an aide to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “We don’t do God”.
The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA, may help that country move beyond its shameful past of slavery, even though the new occupant of the White House, unlike his wife and children, isn’t descended from slaves. His father was from Kenya, in East Africa, while the slaves were taken from West Africa. I can understand the euphoria of so many older Black Americans who have experienced the legal discrimination that no longer exists in seeing a man with darker skin being elected president.
But I wonder how many of those who are moved by this event, which is undoubtedly significant, ask themselves why nine million descendants of slaves from West Africa were denied a vote on November 4 because of the pro-abortion policies that Mr. Obama has so vigorously dedicated his life to. When will they see that “pro-choice” means “no choice”?
