We now live in a world where the cold-blooded murder of a newborn baby is publicly defended. That is not over-the-top “anti-abortion” rhetoric. It has nothing at all to do with abortion.
Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia first described, and then defended, giving doctors the right to kill a baby that has been born and is living and breathing on its own --the very same thing that earned Kermit Gosnell life in prison.
This is not a fuzzy area in law. In 2002 the U.S. Congress unanimously passed a law that every single child born in America is a “person,” a “human being,” a “child” and an “individual.” Now, Northam is leading a chorus of radicals who want the government to deny any defense of that person’s life.
How did we get here? The answer lies in words. Words do not only communicate ideas, they shape our hearts. The consistent and systematic denial of personhood to any human being forever shapes the way we think of that person.
The orthodoxy pretending that Roe v. Wade is not only law, but also holy and right, strictly forbids referring to the unborn in human or relational terms. Call him a fetus or an embryo, but never a child or a person. Call her a pregnant woman, but never a mother.
But the person who uses dehumanizing language toward others is conditioned to think and feel less than humanely toward them. That, in a nutshell, is Northam’s problem. Once he has thought of the baby he is delivering as inhuman until the moment of birth, he finds it impossible to treat her humanely only five minutes after birth. It’s not just his problem. It is Wyoming’s, as well.
Wyoming’s Senate recently debated SF 128 “Unborn victims of violence act.” It would have made it possible to charge with the crime of murder a person who killed an unborn child, except in the act of an abortion. The issue came down to language.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee heard the bill, Liisa Anselmi-Dalton (D-Rock Springs), offered a three-page amendment to the bill. Mainly, it did two things.
First, it deleted every reference to “an unborn child” and replaced it with “a fetus,” but left the term undefined. Technically, that means any unborn vertebrate, not only humans, would be covered by the law.
That could have been easily clarified. One could specify “human fetus,” or simply define fetus in the law as human. Doing neither raises the suspicion that the entire point of the substitution is to hide the humanity of the unborn child.
Anselmi-Dalton’s amendment also deleted every occurrence of the phrase “mother of the unborn child” and replaced it with “a pregnant woman.” Mother and child are relational terms. “Pregnant woman” is deliberately not.
One cannot admit the existence of a relationship before birth if one will not admit the existence of a person before birth. For decades Wyoming women who recognize and cherish the relationship with their unborn children, have been denied any state recognition of that relationship.
One curious consequence of replacing “mother” with “pregnant woman” is what it did to the “Exclusions” section. SF 128 said, “nothing in this act shall apply to any act committed by the mother of an unborn child.” The amendment made it, “nothing in this act shall apply to any act committed by a pregnant woman.”
By not specifying the relationship of mother and child, it would have allowed any pregnant woman at all, to kill the fetus of another pregnant woman with impunity. That is not far-fetched. Competent defense attorneys live for such loopholes.
Certainly, that was an unintended loophole. But how do you close it without recognizing the relationship of pregnant woman and child before birth? What do you call that relationship, if not motherhood?
After going back and forth on the amendment, the entire bill was finally defeated. It was deemed “too confusing.” I think we’re not so much confused as we are conflicted.
Now that Northam and company have suddenly lurched into a defense of murder, it is becoming undeniable that dehumanizing people before birth is harming our own humanity as a nation.
There is no way we could have come to this dark place as a culture without the long and sustained campaign of deleting words that recognize the humanity of the unborn and the natural relationship that exists long before birth. The only way we are going to reverse this homicidal trend is with an equally intentional use of humanizing language for every human being born and unborn.
Does Wyoming have the will to reverse course? Or, will next year’s legislature join Northam in excusing infanticide. It’s a time for choosing.
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