Infanticide Abortion May Be Only the Beginning

Once upon a time, leading Democrats, such as Bill Clinton, wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare." Given the reality of Roe v. Wade and the unlikely prospect of it ever being repealed, this stance on abortion had been the status quo in America for decades. Nevertheless, abortion remains a thorny political and social issue. Democrats, not following the admonition "perfect is the enemy of the good," have doubled down to the point that reversing Roe is not now so far-fetched. Not satisfied with a contentious truce between the pro- and anti-abortion factions in the U.S., the left wants to rub the noses of most decent Americans into new levels of legalized barbarism.

The latest push from Democrats, perhaps emboldened by winning the House last November, is to make abortion "unsafe, repugnant, and common." Several states, including New York and Virginia, have pushed abortion to the limits of humanity, by legalizing, or attempting to do so, literal infanticide, killing full-term babies up until and including at the time of delivery. All this in the name of "choice," ignoring the potential choice of the new human being to live – a baby not at all different from the babies filling the newborn nurseries at hospitals across the country. Late-term abortion, a euphemism for infanticide, at least in the case of recent legislation in several U.S. states, is permitted in seven countries. Only Canada, China, Netherlands, North Korea, Singapore, the U.S., and Vietnam allow elective abortion past 20 weeks, with the Netherlands and Singapore drawing the line at 24 weeks. Thus, only four countries, aside from the U.S., permit full-term abortions. Two of those countries are China and North Korea. It's interesting that those are the countries Democrats want to emulate. Why is infanticide cheered by the N.Y. State Assembly, cable news shows, and liberal in general? These are the same people who love to virtue-signal over rescuing abandoned or mistreated animals. Yet where is the same compassion directed toward newborn human beings needing rescue from the last-minute whims of a woman who decides that having a baby is inconvenient to her mental or emotional well-being? I have two explanations for this push for legalized infanticide. One is economic, and the other is a stepping stone. Planned Parenthood, the largest U.S. provider of reproductive health (abortion) services, has annual revenue of $1.5 billion. Congress provides the organization with $500 million per year, supported by the previous Republican-controlled Congress. This despite campaign promises to defund Planned Parenthood, uttered along with promises to fund a border wall, both nothing but cheap talk. Imagine if Congress had been spending $500 million per year over decades to build a wall! It would long be built by now. Planned Parenthood spent over $38 million in 2016 supporting Hillary Clinton and pro-abortion Democrats. At least that is the amount publicly disclosed. Like the unions and other supposed non-profit organizations, Planned Parenthood is a money-laundering operation for Democrats. Taxpayer dollars get washed by these groups and sent back to Democrat candidates. Nothing gets to Republicans, but they seem happy to go along with this scheme. Abortion is profitable. Aborted babies contain organs, stem cells, and other valuable tissue that can be sold to research companies; organ procurement organizations; and who knows whom else, as Planned Parenthood doesn't talk much about this – unless its staffers are caught on an undercover video. More revenue means more contributions to candidates willing to keep abortion legal and common. Follow the money – plenty of five-figure donations to Democrat members of Congress. These are direct contributions, not money spent on outside organizations campaigning for Democrats and their pet issues. My other theory is that this is a stepping stone. Once infanticide is legalized, state by state, it soon becomes acceptable to America and is the new norm. This is much like the analogy of slowly boiling a frog. The temperature rises slowly enough that the frog doesn't realize that it is cooking until it is too late. Is that what is happening with this push to eliminate inconvenient babies? Who else in society may be inconvenient? Perhaps the elderly, the disabled, and the infirm, those not contributing to society, not paying taxes, instead acting as a drain on government dollars that could be spent more productively, at least according to the views of many in the ruling class. Aside from full-term abortion, what else are Democrats pushing these days? Medicare (actually Medicaid or worse) for all. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, and others want a full government takeover of health care in the U.S., eliminating private insurance, allowing unaccountable government bureaucrats to decide who gets what treatment and when. A small group of people account for significant medical spending. Specifically, "30% of all Medicare expenditures are attributed to the 5% of beneficiaries that die each year, with 1/3 of that cost occurring in the last month of life." Imagine being able to cut these costs from the budget! It's actually on both ends of the spectrum: newborns with serious health problems and the elderly with their own health needs. In my world, patients with macular degeneration in both eyes requiring a monthly injection of medication costing $2,000 can cost Medicare $50,000 per year. That's just for their retina condition. They may have heart or respiratory problems, too, requiring expensive medications and hospitalizations. These individuals, and many more including the disabled, are collecting Social Security each month and not working, not paying into the system. They are only an expense for the ruling class, whose members believe that the federal treasury is theirs to spend as they deem. Children may be born with Down syndrome or other genetic disorders, spina bifida, clubfoot, and other infirmities that are costly to manage. How much money could be saved and put toward government-paid preschool for healthy kids who need little more than an annual physical and vaccinations? If only these expensive patients went away, there would be more money available to fund a single-payer system, which would otherwise be unaffordable, as currently proposed by Bernie Sanders and others. What if that's the next step? Once the public is comfortably numb killing newborn babies, how much easier will it be to justify killing already born infants with severe birth defects or other illnesses not manifest until after birth? Or denying medical care to the elderly under the guise of compassion? Far-fetched? Ask the last president. When President Obama was asked about a 100-year-old woman who needed a pacemaker, he thought she would be "better off not having the surgery, but taking a painkiller" instead. Is this what society is being prepped for with the recent abortion debate? When life at one end of the age spectrum is being cheapened and becomes disposable, life cheapens at the other end of the spectrum, and many places in between. Just remember that Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, had as a goal the sterilization of "morons, mental defectives, epileptics." Other "undesirables" would have to choose between forced sterilization and concentration camps, including "illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends." Legalized eugenics. In a bit of irony, it was Sanger who said, "We don't want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" and eagerly spoke to the KKK. Her modern-day counterpart, Governor Northam of Virginia, is having his own Sanger moment after speaking casually about full-term abortion and dealing with the fallout of his medical school yearbook photos showing him in either blackface or KKK robes. Is the recent push for full-term abortions simply Democrats flexing their perceived muscle? Or is it to fill campaign coffers for upcoming elections? Or, far worse, are we on the slippery slope to a dystopian society where Big Brother decides who lives and who dies? Brian C Joondeph, M.D., MPS is a Denver-based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.