Federal Abortion Law STILL Puts the U.S. in the Infamous Small Group of Nations Like China and North Korea with Little to No Limits on Gruesome Late-Term Abortions – It’s Time For That to End

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the wrongly decided Roe v. Wade opinion earlier this year, it set off a nationwide debate in state legislatures. This kind of robust debate in the states is what the Founders intended in setting up our republican system of federalism. That system ensures that the most hotly-contested and deeply-intimate issues are decided close to the people in the laboratory of the states. Over the last several months, countless states have debated and decided how to best regulate and legislate around the issues of life and abortion, and that is how it should be.

Even so, there clearly remains a role for the federal government to play in this issue. With billions of taxpayer dollars still finding their way into the coffers of the abortion industry every year, we are nowhere close to having disentangled our federal government from the business of abortion. Further, our founding documents lay out a clear role for the protection of life, including the Preamble to our Declaration of Independence, which lists ‘life’ as the first unalienable right.

While the United States is a sovereign nation with control of our own laws, a look around the world confirms a near-consensus that life in the womb warrants full protection under the law at some point during a pregnancy. Only a handful of countries—most notably China, North Korea, and many states in the U.S.—allow abortions up to the very moment of live birth. Even a country as liberal as France recently revisited its law in this area and continued to impose a restriction on abortions after 14 weeks gestation. It is long past time the U.S. quit lagging behind the rest of the world in providing at least some federal gestational limit on abortion on a national scale. Every life is precious and any legal or legislative action that adds protections for life is a step in the right direction. States can, and should, go further in protecting life, but it is time for the federal government to live up to the promises in our founding documents.

To that end, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (SC) and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (NJ) have recently introduced the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act. This legislation would set a federal floor on gestational limits on most abortions at 15 weeks, establishing “federal minimum protections for pain-capable unborn children.” That means that the federal government will act to protect preborn life at this stage in states that have failed to enact stronger protections.

It is especially important for these federal protections to be in place given that science clearly shows us that a baby of this age is capable of feeling pain, and experiences terrific agony when an abortion procedure ends its life by means of dismemberment or chemical destruction. It is imperative that we not allow that type of inhumane treatment of the most defenseless among us.

While it is unlikely that these bills will become law given the makeup of the current Congress and under the current Administration, we continue to call on our federal government to recognize the value of all preborn life, and to catch up with the rest of the civilized world in enacting at least a bare modicum of federal protection. Simultaneously, we encourage the states to move even more decisively in defense of life, and we stand ready to assist in all of these efforts.