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(LifeSiteNews) – Vice President Kamala Harris released another volley of pro-abortion platitudes over the weekend, suggesting that the preborn are not “real human beings” and claiming that supporting the legal power to have them killed is fully compatible with religious faith.
Speaking Saturday at a gathering of Democrat lawmakers in Philadelphia, Harris invoked “public recent stories about what [the overturn of Roe v. Wade] means to real people, real human beings,” a reference to the case in Ohio of a pregnant 10-year-old raped by her mother’s illegal-immigrant boyfriend. “Not to mention the stories that have not been told and have yet to be told.”
On Monday, Harris addressed the NAACP National Convention, where she claimed that “to support a woman’s ability, not her government but her, to make that decision does not require anyone to abandon their faith or their beliefs. It just requires us to agree the government shouldn’t be making that decision for her.”
Vice President Harris assures religious Americans that supporting abortion does not violate their faith: “to support a woman's ability, not her government but her, to make that decision does not require anyone to abandon their faith or their beliefs.”
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) July 18, 2022
There, Harris also compared the banning of abortion to slavery: “we know, NAACP, that our country has a history of claiming ownership over human bodies.”
Kamala Harris compares abortion to slavery: "Our country has a history of claiming ownership over human bodies." pic.twitter.com/nElsltlTO5
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 18, 2022
In fact, long-settled biological criteria and mainstream medical textbooks establish that a living human being, structurally and genetically distinct from his or her mother, is created upon fertilization and is present throughout the entirety of pregnancy. This is not in serious dispute; in 2019, University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development graduate Steve Jacobs found that 96% of more than 5,500 biologists he surveyed agreed, despite overwhelmingly identifying as “liberal,” “pro-choice,” and Democrats, and a majority identifying as “non-religious.”
As for abortion’s alleged compatibility with religion, there is a fundamental difference between sins of an individual nature, i.e. falling short of a religion’s moral standards for how to live one’s life, and evils of the sort that inflict harm – in the case of abortion, death – on someone else. The Bible repeatedly condemns “murder” and “shed[ding] innocent blood” as “detestable to” the Lord, because “in the image of God has God made mankind.”
Regarding the vice president’s invocation of slavery, the opposite is the case; in fact, the parallels between legal abortion and legal slavery extend well beyond the obvious. Both denied the equality and humanity of an entire class of people in order to violate their fundamental rights (slaves on the basis of race; the preborn on the basis of developmental stage); both were sustained by intensely controversial Supreme Court rulings (Roe; Dred Scott v. Sandford); and both even rested on similar arguments about personal freedom, America’s founding principles, and human progress.
Roe v. Wade’s’ overturn sparked the activation of numerous pre-Roe abortion bans that had gone unenforced for decades, as well as more recent pro-life laws that had been blocked by courts, and trigger laws designed not to take effect until Roe was reversed. Across the country, abortion giant Planned Parenthood has suspended abortions and/or closed locations in reaction to the ruling, and pro-life attorneys general have declared their intentions to enforce their states’ duly-enacted abortion prohibitions.
But leftists prosecutors in dozens of localities have vowed not to enforce such laws, ensuring that work and debate will continue over the prospect of banning abortion nationally. Pro-abortion activists’ emphasis on supporting interstate travel for abortion also presents a challenge to pro-life policymakers, though groups such as the Thomas More Society and National Association of Christian Lawmakers are currently exploring potential solutions. President Joe Biden has called for electing more Democrats to Congress to support codifying a “right” to abortion-on-demand in federal law.