(LifeSiteNews) — One of The Babylon Bee’s best headlines is from April of this year: “Tragic: Post Office Fails To Deliver Abortion Pill On Time And Now There’s This Adorable Baby.” The faux news article begins:
In a horrific tragedy, the Postal Service was unable to deliver an abortion pill in time and now an adorable baby has been born. ‘It’s sickening. Just look at this beautiful, sweet baby,’ said delivery nurse Amy Schneider. ‘All of this cuteness, this amazing new life, could so easily have been avoided with one little pill. Why, God??’
According to doctors, not taking an abortion pill has been directly linked to cuddly babies being born alive. ‘Taking an abortion pill destroys a baby’s blood supply, ensuring no one experiences the calamity of seeing their wonderful, squishy faces,’ said Dr. Rhonda Miller. ‘If only this baby’s mother could have taken that pill, she wouldn’t be suffering through looking into the precious eyes of her daughter. It’s almost enough to make me cry.’
As is so often the case with Babylon Bee stories, they’re not far off. The press has published plenty of stories mourning the number of children being born as a result of protections for pre-born children – one notable New York Times essay even featured a photo of a young woman holding her child, with the journalist who authored the piece noting grimly that the mother had not had the right to have her child killed in the womb. (I hope that she gets a nasty email from the baby when she’s all grown up).
The Atlantic, too, warned in an essay that: “We Are Not Prepared For the Coming Surge of Babies.” The artwork accompanying the article was a dark room filled with ominous-looking cribs, as if the “surge of babies” constituted an infant invasion. Interestingly, prior to the Dobbs decision we were consistently told by such publications that any abortion ban would result in women dying in back alleys – that women who wanted an abortion would always and inevitably get them anyways, and that thus protections for pre-born children do not actually save any lives. As it turns out, when abortion is banned, coat hangers are used to hang up baby clothes.
The press has now gone from warning about dangerous, illegal abortions (they are promoting those) to warning about, as Axios put it, a “post-Roe baby boom.” The New York Times reported in January that “Amid a baby boom, Texas gains 1000 residents every day.” And indeed, it appears that the baby boom is already here. From the Texas Tribune:
Close to 10,000 additional babies were born over a nine-month period after Texas banned most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, a new analysis from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows. This is the first analysis of live birth rates since the law, known as Senate Bill 8, went into effect in September 2021. Texas has since banned nearly all abortions from the moment of conception, except when necessary to save the life of the pregnant patient. Analyzing live births in April through December 2022, the study captures people who were at least seven weeks pregnant when the law went into effect or later became pregnant. The researchers used historical birth data to model how many births likely would have occurred in Texas if the law hadn’t gone into effect and compared that to the number of actual births.
This is unambiguously wonderful news. It bears noting here that Texas passed their abortion ban along with an allocation of $100 million to an “Alternatives to Abortion” fund, and earlier this year the Texas legislature voted to add another $20 million annual to that fund. Some of that money is going to crisis pregnancy centres and nonprofits committed to helping new moms and their children.
Along with data that indicates that tens of thousands of children have been born across the country directly due to the Dobbs decision, the pro-life movement’s simple political premise is being borne out again and again: pro-life laws save lives.
