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February 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Last week, Vice President Mike Pence joined in the conversation over extreme pro-abortion bills recently enacted in New York and considered in Virginia, writing an op-ed decrying the culmination of the Democrat Party’s wholesale rejection of abortion limits over the past several years.

Video went viral last week of Democrat Del. Kathy Tran admitting her bill to repeal Virginia’s restrictions on late-term abortions would allow abortions just as a woman is about to give birth. Following that, Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam suggested that a born-alive “infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.” He later claimed he was only referring to cases such as a “nonviable pregnancy” or “severe fetal abnormalities.”

Tran’s bill was tabled in committee, but the controversy – and the mainstream media’s defensive coverage of it – intensified a discussion of the extremes to which Democrats and their allies have settled on abortion. Such a discussion was already underway in response to New York’s recently-enacted law, which received cheers in the state capitol, declaring a “fundamental right” to abortion and effectively letting babies be killed until birth.

“There’s another word for this: infanticide. And it is morally reprehensible and evil,” Pence wrote of Northam’s comments Thursday in National Review.

“This shameless embrace of a culture of death is startling to every American who cherishes life,” the vice president wrote. “Not too long ago, the Democratic party’s stated position was that abortion should be ‘safe, legal, and rare.’ It was this widespread rejection of late-term abortion that led a large bipartisan majority in Congress to pass the partial-birth-abortion ban in 2003. But now look at how far the Democratic party has fallen.”

“To support, let alone cheer, late-term abortions not only marks a disturbing step backward by so-called ‘progressives’ — it also violates every demand of human decency,” he continued. “As modern science has moved the point of viability ever earlier in pregnancy, most Americans have agreed that a child who can survive outside the womb deserves a chance at life. Only a handful of countries, including China and North Korea, allow late-term abortions.”

Pence suggested those cheers and comments were a wakeup call to the idea that “states were moving beyond such barbaric practices,” and argued the bills “should be a call to action for all Americans” to “recommit ourselves, today and every day, to restoring the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”

The vice president went on to tout the Trump administration’s pro-life record so far (particularly Donald Trump’s moves to withdraw the United States from supporting abortion abroad), incremental pro-life laws at the state level, and the downward trend in American abortion rates.

“So even in this dark moment in our nation’s history, Americans should take heart. The New York and Virginia bills aren’t some bold departure into a brave new world. They are the last gasp of a dying movement that stands in stark and irreconcilable contrast with our nation’s timeless founding principles,” Pence claimed.

The vice president concluded by promising that the Trump administration “will continue to fight until our nation once again recognizes and celebrates the sanctity of all human life.”