Taking a pause in the heat of the midterms to check on the health of children.
Taking a pause in the heat of the midterms to check on the health of children.
‘I refuse to let my new granddaughter have to fight for the rights generations have fought for and won, rights that she should be guaranteed.”
That was the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, on the night of May 2, 2022. The draft opinion in the Mississippi abortion case (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) that would overturn Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court had just been leaked, and this governor-grandmother’s response was to think about her newborn granddaughter in the context of abortion.
Hochul even slept on it and, the next day, doubled down: “And as a woman, this is personal. This is something that we have fought against for my entire life. In fact, this is a battle my mother’s generation, it’s a battle from my generation, my daughter’s generation, and it seems like even my three-day-old grandchild Sophia’s generation will have to be fighting this same fight. Something that we had thought we had put to bed a long time ago.”
Rarely do you see the culture of death strangling the culture of life so clearly. And, believe me, as someone who was somewhat obsessed with it at the time, it was barely noticed. She was just a Democrat supporting abortion. A baptized Catholic who graduated from the Catholic University of America’s law school.
Four and a half years later, we still don’t know how that draft opinion got leaked in the first place, so perhaps it’s no surprise that there was no local, let alone national, outrage about Hochul’s reflexively throwing innocent human life under the never-ending abortion express campaign. She’s gone on to openly defy laws in states such as Texas and Louisiana — laws that protect the lives of the unborn by preventing New York doctors from sending abortion pills across state lines.
Dobbs became official in late June, and within a week, the pro-abortion left was taking up the case of a ten-year-old girl in Ohio supposedly to show that the end of Roe was detrimental to the health and freedom of the women of the United States.
Once news broke, the case — the girl was taken from the Buckeye State to Indiana to have an abortion — quickly reached the White House and became a national rallying cry for advocates of abortion. “She was forced to have to travel out of the state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life,” Joe Biden said. “Ten years old — ten years old! — raped, six weeks pregnant, already traumatized, was forced to travel to another state.”
When the president of Planned Parenthood was asked about the case in an interview with Time, she saw it as just another example of “extremism” on the part of abortion opponents.
Ohio had passed a law in 2019 that went into effect once Dobbs dropped that protected the unborn around six weeks, the heartbeat marker. According to reports, the child carrying the baby was six weeks and three days pregnant when a doctor in Indiana was called about her.
We never took a moment to stop with business as usual. She was a child who had been raped. Now there were two children whose lives demanded our attention. This is the life of a child and an unborn child growing within her after she was raped when she was nine years old.
But instead, our hyper-political reflex seems to be to fall into talking points about abortion when faced with such an abhorrent situation. Consider James Talarico, currently running against Ken Paxton to replace Republican John Cornyn, who has been serving in the U.S. Senate for almost a quarter century.
“We talk about Texas women, but it’s also Texas girls — we see girls as young as 10 years old who need that abortion care, and they can’t get it in Texas,” Talarico said during a recent CNN town hall. Had he simply made an assertion about basic women’s health care, he would be parroting a decades-long standard for his party. And yet, bringing up pregnant children as he did: We should all stop in our tracks.
The Houston Chronicle last year reported, citing Texas Health and Human Services Commission data, that “at least 100 Texas children aged 17 and younger got abortions in other states during the first year after Texas banned the procedure, including six aged 11 and under.” See, this is something Biden and I can both get incensed about. Why are ten-year-olds getting pregnant? This should not be subject to a standard rhetorical tug-of-war over abortion in America. Pregnant ten-year-old girls mean that the kids are not alright.
And given the Wild West–like online-ordering reality of the availability of abortion pills by mail, no one knows what the accurate story is, including how it may pertain to children.
Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana, and Kentucky actively encourages ownership of a supply of abortion pills “just in case,” as the new tool for a purse or medicine cabinet, should a “person” become pregnant.
While the official language is directed to those 18 and older, the age restriction is nearly impossible to police.
What most of our news, political, commentariat frenzies miss is that there is no one candidate or piece of legislation that is going to remedy all that divides us on these most intimate issues — especially those that involve the human individual, meant to be in healthy relationship with others, made for a fuller flourishing than the sexual revolution ever promised. It’s faux freedom that suffocates the imagination of innocence — the dreams of pure hearts about true love and intact family life.
And, at the very least, protecting ten-year-olds from sexual predators is our responsibility as adults in a democratic republic forever reliant on goodness and virtue to thrive. Our failure to protect them can never become a mere political talking point. That’s a sign of a culture in grave moral peril. The end of Roe gave us an opportunity to do life and, yes, even abortion politics better. So far we’ve woefully failed.
Around the same time as the birth of her granddaughter, Hochul also made clear — which she has since reiterated — that she sees the Empire State as a Lady Liberty beckoning pregnant people for their pregnancies’ terminations. What if, instead, the Empire State were known as a haven for children in biological families, in foster care, in adoptive forever homes — with their very lives and health, well-being, and flourishing as priorities? That’s a model worth piloting.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.