Ohio Issue 1 — A Sign of the Weakness, Not the Strength, of the Abortion Lobby
Ohio voters have made a big mistake. Issue 1 puts into their state's Constitution a "right" to unlimited abortion.
The first consideration is that nobody won last night on abortion. Abortion destroys everything it touches. It rips a living human baby to pieces.
It also brings profound devastation to the parents and family of that baby.
I have served for the last 20 years as the pastoral director of the world’s largest ministry for healing after abortion — Rachel’s Vineyard — and the largest mobilization of those who have had abortions and share their stories — the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
In both roles I have seen human grief beyond description, as people wrestle with the shame of having had their own child killed.
It’s a lifetime of regret and multiple forms of damage to their own ability to function.
Abortion destroys the abortionists, who live under a convoluted and self-destructive pile of lies that dehumanize themselves as well as the babies they kill.
And abortion destroys our system of self-governance, because its proponents, to achieve their goals, have to steer people away from the legislative process.
Instead of considering the reality of what abortion is, they attempt to shut down all debate by inventing fake constitutional rights that have no basis in reason or in American history.
Indeed, it’s not a matter of anti-abortion wins or pro-abortion rights wins.
Unless anti-abortion wins, nobody wins.
The second consideration, building on this thought of shutting down debate, is that the abortion advocates and the Democrat candidates never describe what they defend.
You hear them talking about reproductive rights and health, and occasionally throwing the word “abortion” into the abortion debate, but they never describe what abortion is.
I challenge them to do so.
Don’t take my words or those of any pro-life leader. Use the words of the abortionists, from their medical textbooks.
Better yet, show the pictures of what abortion does to a baby. You’re celebrating a right to abortion, after all. So show us what it is.
In their statements on the passage of Issue 1 in Ohio last night, both President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris manifest complete oblivion as to why abortion is even a debate in this country, and that is, that along with the reproductive rights of women, Americans value the right to life of the child.
The fact that there even is a child, or a second life however they may want to designate it, does not even factor into their consideration or their language.
How can we have a debate on this issue when one side pretends that there is nothing to debate?
All of this leads me to conclude that the pursuit of these ballot initiatives for a “Constitutional right to abortion” rather than simply introducing a bill are not a sign of the strength of the abortion lobby, but of their weakness.
They know full well that the will of Ohio citizens has already been made known in the fact that Ohio has passed numerous reasonable limits on abortion and indeed has even passed the Heartbeat legislation.
Measures like Issue 1 are not meant to express the will of the people but to bypass it, and impose on the people and their elected representatives a fake right, an invented dogma, an un-American pretense, that somehow the people should be constitutionally prohibited from protecting the youngest children from what is undeniably an act of violence.
We have to ask, therefore, what happens next. What will their answer be when parents across Ohio begin finding out that their 15-year old daughter had an abortion — or a trans-gender surgery — and that they as parents no longer have a right to know about it?
How will voters respond when they see more abortion clinics opening in their neighborhood where healthy babies of healthy mothers are being aborted in the final months of pregnancy, and they are told that Ohioans can no longer use the legislative process to protect such children from having their heads chopped off?
Issue 1 creates the same kind of pressure-cooker in Ohio that Roe vs. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) created nationally.
By cutting off the ability of citizens to wrestle with abortion policy in ways they believe are reasonable, the other side has only intensified the conflict we have and will continue to have – in public policy and in our own hearts and minds — on this issue.
And it has narrowed the avenues by which that conflict can be resolved.
Frank Pavone is one of the most prominent anti-abortion leaders globally. Read Frank Pavone Reports — More Here.