In standing by President Trump and his administration -- and, indeed, in now honoring him as their standard-bearer -- traditional pro-life leaders have put short-term and uncertain political gain ahead of consistent moral principle…

Having ignored an earlier border deal that would have made the issue moot, Democrats have stooped to a new low by comparing the separation of children from their illegal alien parents as required by current law to the mass murder of the unborn, including the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts. That is what Charles C. Camosy , a board member of Democrats for Life, an oxymoron if there ever was one, does in the June 16 New York Times opinion section in a piece with the Orwellian title “You Can’t Be Pro-Life And Against Immigrant Children”:

If the traditional pro-life movement is to regain credibility as something other than a tool of the Trump administration, it must speak out clearly and forcefully against harming innocent children as a means of deterring undocumented immigration.

First, these are not “immigrant” children. They are children of illegal alien parents. Second, no innocent children are being physically harmed in any way, certainly not killed in their mother’s womb. The Border Patrol is not Planned Parenthood. If illegal alien parents don’t want to be separated from their children, how about not crossing the border illegally with them? This comparison is obscene and slanderous. Abortion and Planned Parenthood separate more kids from their families and mothers than the Border Patrol which, by the way, doesn't kill them in the womb. Liberals such as Camosy, whom I assume supports sanctuary cities, offer no sanctuary for the unborn who also seek to avoid violence and murder in what should be the safest “safe space” in the world -- their mother’s womb.

Being pro-life and against open borders are not inconsistent positions, particularly when you consider open borders have led to a vast increase in MS-13 entrants and unaccompanied minors and those who would be their recruits. How is opposing a system that lets MS-13 butchers, rapists, and murders into this country not pro-life?

American citizens have a right to life and a right not to be killed by illegal aliens. As Bill O’Reilly noted in his June 1, 2016 Talking Points Memo:

You may remember last July 32-year-old Kate Steinle was murdered in San Francisco. She was out for a walk with her father when an illegal alien felon convicted in the U.S.A. seven times deported five times shot her in the back. The man Mexican national Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez had been released from jail by the San Francisco Sheriff's Department. That despite the fact that ICE, Homeland Security, had asked San Francisco authorities to keep Sanchez incarcerated until they could pick him up.

Opposing this is not pro-life? On Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015, Jamiel Shaw, Sr. testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on how his son, Jamiel Shaw, Jr., was killed by an illegal alien in 2008 harbored by the sanctuary city of Los Angeles

Shaw was a Los Angeles high school star dreaming of a good life ahead when he was gunned down on March 2, 2008, while walking home. He was picked at random, police said, possibly as part of a gang loyalty test for the illegal alien who shot him. Charged with the crime was Pedro Espinoza, who'd been released just hours earlier from Los Angeles County Jail where he spent four months for brandishing a firearm and resisting arrest. Espinoza is an illegal alien.

Shaw, Sr. warned of the consequences of sanctuary cities harboring criminal illegal aliens and not deporting them, of not enforcing existing immigration laws, and of open borders:

"My son, Jamiel Shaw II, was murdered while walking on his own street, three houses down from his home. An illegal alien on his first gun charge was visiting a neighbor when my son was coming home," Shaw testified. "He shot my son in the stomach and then in the head, killing him." Shaw then asked an obvious question: "Do black lives really matter? Or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or white policeman?"

As for children being forcibly separated from their parents, does Mr. Carmosy remember Elian Gonzalez, forced to return to Communist Cuba literally at gunpoint after being torn from the arms of what American courts had said were his legal guardians?

Elian Gonzalez was nearing his sixth birthday on Thanksgiving 1999 when a fisherman off the Florida coast found him hanging onto an inner tube after his mother, among others fleeing Castro’s Cuba drowned in the attempt.

Elian’s mother was hoping to bring Elian and join the extended family in the U.S. as they fled the poverty and oppression (sound familiar?) of Cuba. Elian’s father, who was separated from his wife at the time, chose to stay behind.

As Fox News Latino reported, Gonzalez's Miami relatives had refused to surrender him to authorities, leading to the infamous raid on April 22, 2000, on President Bill Clinton's watch, by armed federal agents who seized Elian at gunpoint from a closet where he was hiding at his uncle's home in Little Havana. He was forcibly returned to Cuba two months later… It was then-Deputy Attorney General Holder who invented the "legal" cover for federal agents to forcibly enter the home of Elian Gonzalez's legal custodians, American citizens all, so he could be returned to the warm embrace of Castro in communist Cuba. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that once the INS chose a guardian, the guardianship could not be changed. On Dec, 1, 1999, the INS asserted that Miami-based uncle Lazaro Gonzalez was now Elian's legal custodian. Holder then decided on his own that the court ruling and the INS determination were both invalid and that Elian would be returned to his father in Cuba… Today, if Elian Gonzalez were Honduran and his reunited family likely to vote Democratic down the road, he might get to stay with Holder's blessings under the same rule of lawlessness that once forcibly returned a young Cuban boy to Castro's tyranny.

Democrats, who under Bill Clinton, stood silently by as Elian Gonzalez was seized at gunpoint and forcibly removed to the oppression of Castro’s Communist Cuba, now suddenly are comparing legally separating children on a temporary basis from their illegal alien parents, to Nazi Germany.

One remembers how Nancy Pelosi was able to stand for eight hours for young people in the country illegally but couldn’t bother to stand eight seconds at the SOTU for the parents of Nisa Mickens & Kayla Cuevas, two American teenagers killed on Long Island by MS-13:

The parents of a teenager killed by MS-13 gang members hit out at the Democrats who declined to stand and applaud when President Trump honored them at Tuesday's State of the Union address. Elizabeth Alvarado and Robert Mickens' daughter, 15-year-old Nisa Mickens, was brutally murdered in Brentwood, N.Y., in September 2016. Mickens was murdered along with her friend, 16-year-old Kayla Cuevas, whose parents were also in attendance. The girls were targeted with machetes and baseball bats after Cuevas and some of her friends got into a dispute with MS-13 members. Police said Mickens was in the wrong place at the wrong time. "We cannot imagine the depth of your sorrow, but we can make sure that other families never have to endure this pain," Trump said in his speech.

No American should feel such pain. Securing our borders is the pro-life position, as is opposing abortion. What the Border Patrol does has no resemblance to the murder and dismemberment of the unborn supported by groups such as Planned Parenthood. The children of illegal alien parents no doubt would like to enter the United States and be allowed to stay. So do the unborn.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.