Opinion
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January 23, 2019 (Priests for Life) — In 2013, a young kindergarten teacher from Westchester County in New York traveled to the late-term abortion mill operated by LeRoy Carhart in Germantown, Maryland. She was there to abort her daughter at 33 weeks because she had been warned the baby would have a seizure disorder.

Several days after her daughter was killed by an injection into her heart, the young mother died too, victim of a botched abortion. They were buried in the same coffin.

Thanks to the Democrats now running New York State, the young mother could have stayed home for that third-trimester abortion and there’s no guarantee it would have ended any differently. The later an abortion, the more dangerous it is for the mother. And of course every abortion is fatal for the baby.

But the New York State Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo likely did not take mothers and their babies into account as they heralded passage of the Reproductive Health Act. Perhaps they were thinking of all those campaign dollars from Planned Parenthood filling all those campaign coffers.

It’s not like New York needs more abortion. Numbers there, particularly for New York City, are nothing short of shocking.

In New York City, thousands more babies of African-American mothers are aborted than born, and the abortion rate among these moms is three times higher than it is for white mothers. Seeing an African-American woman smiling behind Andrew Cuomo as he signed the bill into law was so incongruous. How could she smile, knowing that even more black children will die?

Currently, abortion is legal in New York State until 24 weeks. The new law will do away with that limit and allow abortion throughout the ninth month for babies deemed incompatible with life. And if the mother’s life or health – including her mental health – could be imperiled by the pregnancy, abortion will be available until her due date. Mental health is the key here, as it always is. It allows abortion, as the abortion advocates like to say, on demand and without apology.

As if the law wasn’t bad enough, One World Trade Center was lit in pink – the color of Planned Parenthood – in celebration of this newly expanded right to abortion. The irony, of course, is that the inverted fountains set up in the footprints of the Twin Towers list the names of all those who died that terrible day in 2001. Pregnant women are listed by their names and with the words “and her unborn child.”

Under the new law, those babies in the womb would not be considered to be terror victims. They would be non-persons.

In addition to expanding abortion access in the near term, the new law will ensure that if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and leaves it up to individual states to decide whether to end the legal murder of the unborn, abortion will continue unfettered in New York. This clearly calls for a new strategy.

In Roe v. Wade, the justices ruled that the word person does not include the unborn. If they do overturn this bad decision, the justices of the Roberts court have the opportunity to reinterpret the word person to include the unborn. Then babies will be protected even in Andrew Cuomo’s murderous state.

I am a native New Yorker, and when the state had a Right to Life political party, I ran for New York City Council. Sadly, New York’s shift to the left began soon after, and eventually the Right to Life party was no longer recognized on the ballot. I was thrilled when Priests for Life moved from New York to Florida.

As much as I would like to blame Cuomo and his fellow Democrats, it’s the New York voters who I lived and worked among for so many years who are to blame. They are responsible for this barbaric bill.

Democrats in the state have been trying to expand abortion access for years, but the Republican-controlled Senate has been able to keep them at bay. Now, with Democrats in control of both houses and an abortion ideologue in the statehouse, the inmates are in charge of the asylum, and babies and their mothers will suffer.

Janet Morana is the executive director of Priests for Life.