The Ugliness of New York's New Law
It's one of the saddest days in America. Yesterday, New York’s governor signed a bill into law that allows abortion up to the day of birth, but the most horrific part of that bill is that there is no longer protection for the child that survives abortion. The United States is now opening its moral doors to infanticide.
Infanticide is legal in the Netherlands. The Daily Caller’s Wesley Smith writes:
“(a) checklist has even been published — including in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine — known as the Groningen Protocol, by which Dutch neonatologists determine which sick and disabled babies qualify to be euthanized. Indeed, according to two articles published in The Lancet, about 8% of all babies who die each year in the Netherlands (80-90) are killed by their own doctors.
But now, some advocates want to take the infanticide license beyond unhealthy and disabled babies, to include unwanted babies. A new article that has gotten much attention in the blogosphere, "After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, asserts that whatever reasons justify abortion — and in the USA that means anything and everything — also support the right of parents to have unwanted infants painlessly killed.”
(https://www.businessinsider.com/the-shocking-case-for-legalizing-infanticide-2012-2)
The medical community is listening to arguments that not only devalue preborn human life but give them new justification to kill those who cannot defend themselves for any reason. 68 clergy in Iowa and 90 in New Mexico including those from the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian USA, and ELCA churches have signed letters supporting these abortion rights. When the powerful medical and religious communities, whose very role is the definition and preservation of human life are convinced only certain human life needs protection, then we are a very confused society indeed. Abortion and infanticide today, but euthanasia will be coming soon.
How has this happened? Over the last 50 years, we’ve allowed this creeping paradigm that not all humans deserve to live, only those who meet certain qualifications for life.
Subject to those qualifications is the fought-over definition of Personhood. The definition is important because Personhood guarantees legal protection. When the definition is inadequate then rights are affected as well. The law signed into effect yesterday states that a person “means a human being who has been born and is alive.” But even that statement is deceptive since now, in New York, a baby surviving an abortion (born alive) has no rights as a person. and can be subsequently killed.
Scripture makes it clear that all humans are given personhood from the Creator in whose image we are made. Each conception is a person, who has a God-given right to life.
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you came out from the womb I consecrated you;” Jeremiah 1:5
Lord, help us, we pray!