Under Roe vs. Wade, doctors are allowed to perform abortion usually until the 24th to the 28th week after conception, or until "the point of viability" when the fetus is thought to be able to survive outside the womb. After the point of viability, abortion may be allowed but only to preserve the mother’s health. Roe vs. Wade led to the extermination of millions of lives of unborn children. About 1.3 million abortions are done each year in the United States. For quite a time, the conventional and generally accepted process is to dismember the fetus in the womb and then remove it in pieces. The Americans see nothing wrong with these evil and abominable deeds simply because their law recognizes their right to do so. Their consciences have been numbed by fiction of law. It was no longer a question of right or wrong but of how to improve the process to make it safer for the women who practice abortion. And so they came up with a more evil and cruel process known as "partial live birth abortion" where the living fetus with a brain and beating heart is partially removed from the womb and its skull punctured or crushed. One of the groups utilizing this process is the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) which performs about half of the abortion in the States in its 900 or so clinics.
And so when a federal law was enacted banning Partial Birth Abortion, PPFA challenged the constitutionality of the law in the District Court of San Francisco, California. Other challenges to the law have been filed in New York and Nebraska. The usual argument raised by abortion rights activists is that a woman’s right to choose is paramount and that it is therefore irrelevant whether a fetus suffers pain. Despite the government’s stand that the procedure is inhumane, causes pain to the fetus, is not medically necessary and blurs the line between abortion and infanticide, the woman District Judge in San Francisco, Phyllis Hamilton declared the Act unconstitutional as "it poses an undue burden on a woman’s right to choose abortion".
The ruling has further sunk American society deeper into the hole of moral decadence. After initially seeing nothing evil in killing the life of an unborn child, it likewise finds nothing wrong with terminating the life of a fetus in a cruel and inhumane manner all because of selfish motive to protect and exercise a perceived individual and inviolable right. Perhaps in a fit of remorse, a lot of Americans have been alarmed by these developments. In the coming elections, one of the overriding issues raised by the voters is the candidates’ stand on abortion, particularly on partial birth abortion. As reported by USA Today, the election in the US is shaping up into a contest where people will vote not anymore on the basis of perceived economic interests but on their perceived values.
While the Americans are beginning to realize their mistake about abortion and its evil consequences, Filipinos are still considering various methods of controlling birth that inevitably end up in the legalization of abortion and, in all probability, even in that cruel partial live birth abortion. Women’s rights activists in the Philippines are now openly advocating reproductive health measures that are patterned after the abhorrent American practices purely based on selfish motives. They are dragging our society down the hole of moral decadence where the Americans are now trying to get out of. If we allow them to succeed, we have not learned our lessons well from the American experience. We have copied their mistakes instead of avoiding them.
E-mail: jcson@info.com.ph