“Just sit on the toilet. You don’t have to look at anything.”

These are the words our undercover investigator – 27 weeks pregnant, with a big belly – heard on January 14, 2013. The setting was Southwestern Women’s Options, in the heart of the late-term abortion capital of the United States Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The investigator was seeking a late-term abortion – the sort only a few facilities, including Southwestern Women’s Options, will do.

The counselor told her how the procedure is done: how the abortionist would stab her abdomen with a needle containing digoxin, a heart-stopping poison. How the needle would pierce the baby – not necessarily in the heart; it could be “through the baby’s bottom” or “through the head – the cranium,” and pump this toxic chemical into her system, killing her. How the mother would carry on for days, bearing her dead child in her womb, until her body recognized that the little life had been snuffed out. Then the mother would deliver – perhaps even in a hotel room, in the middle of the night, with no one to help her.

Note that the abortion counselor was candid with our investigator, calling her pre-born child a “baby.” Ironic that you get more candor from abortion proponents behind the walls of an abortion clinic than from Planned Parenthood spokespeople rigidly insisting on “fetus.”

This is what we found when we investigated one late-term abortion facility in notoriously lax New Mexico. It makes sense: when state government allows for an abortion Wild West, the seediest so-called doctors will flock to set up shop there. Dr. Curtis Boyd, who owns Southwestern Women’s Options, has admitted on camera that he is “killing.” And despite the deaths of two women in his clinic, and malpractice lawsuits against him and his staff, the abortionist continues to grow his bloody business – and is allowed by the state to do it.

That may come to an end, though, as residents of Albuquerque prepare to vote on November 19 on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Ordinance, which would ban abortion after 20 weeks’ gestation in Albuquerque. Citizens seeking protection for pre-born children – and for their mothers, don’t forget – got over 27,000 signatures, more than double the minimum, to put the measure up for a vote. Even then, a pro-abortion city councilwoman tried at the last minute to strike the ordinance. But the people prevailed, and now they’ll have their say on Tuesday.

For the pro-life side, this fight has always been about equal protection of human rights and the personhood of the unborn child. To be pro-life is to recognize, like our founders did, that all humans are created equal – no matter their size, level of development, or location.

Yes, the life of that precious child in the womb is worth as much as the life of her mother. No more, no less. And both must be protected.

The existence of basic human rights doesn’t change because people succeed in dehumanizing a whole group of people. Abortion advocates have spent so long dehumanizing the pre-born baby – calling her “fetal tissue” or a “clump of cells” or “the products of conception” – that this fact has become hard to grasp. But even tough truths are truths nonetheless.

What we are seeing now is Albuquerque’s struggle to embrace the truth. It’s an uphill battle – note the hundreds of thousands of dollars Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and other pro-abortion organizations are dumping into Albuquerque these days. Yet this dump has been quiet. Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s CEO, recognizes that she can’t fundraise off late-term abortion – off poisoning and dismembering precious pre-born children with feet, fingerprints, and faces. She will never admit in a tweet or facebook post that this is called a “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Ordinance” because pre-born children at 5 months feel excruciating pain before death during abortion. Americans cringe at this sort of barbarity.

But the Planned Parenthoods and NARALs of the world must fight for these gruesome late-term abortions, so abhorred by the American people. In one of Live Action’s latest investigative videos, a staffer at Southwestern Women’s Options reveals that a 25-week abortion costs $8,000, with another thousand added on for every week the mother waits.

For abortion advocates and abortionists themselves, big money is at risk in Albuquerque. For the pro-life movement, as always, it’s irreplaceable human lives on the line.

Think about that first line, those words our investigator heard in the bowels of Southwestern Women’s Options. “Just sit on the toilet.” Is a toilet the place for a baby?

Residents of Albuquerque going to the polls on Tuesday should ask themselves: Do I want my city to be the “late-term abortion capital of America”? Better to run the abortionists out of town, with their poisonous injections, brutal “extraction” procedures, their sleazy hotel partners and “medical advice” that includes the use of hotel toilets as abortion receptacles.

Women and children deserve so much more than this from a civilized society. Albuquerque has the chance to give them something better.

As Planned Parenthood and abortion advocates are pouring hundreds of thousands into affecting Tuesday’s vote, the nation is watching. If Albuquerque succeeds, those abortionists will try to set up shop somewhere else. It’s up to defenders of human rights in every state to fight them wherever they go.

Lila Rose is president and founder of Live Action.