Michigan Must Protect Life

 after nearly 50 years and 63 million unborn lives lost, the Supreme Court has finally won a victory for life. With its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court has reversed Roe v. Wade’s muddled constitutional law and Planned Parenthood v. Casey’s arrogant attempt to settle the most contentious debate in American political life by judicial fiat.

Several weeks ago, Michigan Court of Claims judge Elizabeth Gleicher granted a request made by Planned Parenthood of Michigan for a preliminary injunction barring the enforcement of the state’s law banning abortions in case Roe v. Wade was overturned. By overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has referred back to my colleagues and me in the state legislature what Michigan’s abortion policy will be. But Democrats are again trying to circumvent this process altogether. They are unwilling to openly deliberate this fundamental question: Is an unborn baby a human being?

Only after answering that question can one formulate a coherent policy on the availability of elective abortions. Elected Democrats in Michigan and elsewhere have elided this question. But the implicit assumption in their actions is that a baby is of no worth. They will often tie themselves into rhetorical knots to avoid drawing attention to this issue. They will insist, for example, on using the dehumanizing term “fetus” when a baby is not wanted, but use “baby” when a child is expected to be born.

If unborn children are human beings, then they are the same kind of creature as the rest of us. If that’s true, it cannot be morally permissible to terminate their lives at will. But elected Democrats in my state have evidently gone beyond finding it morally permissible. Indeed, they have determined that the right to kill an innocent human being should be promoted by the state of Michigan.

In their public statements thus far, my Democrat colleagues have completely ignored the question of what constitutes human life. Their concerns over Roe’s reversal have remained confined to the effect of this on women who would otherwise seek an abortion. But in raising their (surely deeply felt) concerns for the health and safety of mothers of unborn babies, they seemingly never consider whether an unborn human being also has an interest in the question — even when the baby is past the point of viability and is fully capable of feeling pain. Some abortion advocates go so far as to claim that it should not matter if a baby is full-term and ready to be born. Even then, they say, there is not a meaningful state interest in protecting the unborn baby’s life. The Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative, a petition drive supported by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, would allow for post-viability abortions based solely on undefined mental health concerns. Whitmer and other prominent Democrats have also favored repealing Michigan’s prohibition on elective abortions without any remaining protections for unborn children even up to the moment of birth.

Only a depraved heart or an ignorant mind could overlook such obvious cruelty. Yet the pro-abortion extremists in Michigan have all managed to overlook any concern for our state’s most vulnerable and innocent lives.

Supporters of this approach have characterized their efforts as supporting marginalized groups. Their true object, however, is to prevent any restrictions on abortion, including the prohibition of abortions on the basis of a baby’s race, sex, or disability, which is the subject of a package of bills introduced by my colleague Representative Julie Calley and me. Those bills, introduced prior to the repeal of Roe, would, even if a general prohibition on elective abortion were determined to be unenforceable, affirmatively prevent discrimination against marginalized groups. But rather than support the equal dignity of all human lives, the Left’s approach would instead reinforce systems in which more babies are aborted in minority communities than in white ones and in which a child’s disability is seen as a reason to prevent it from drawing its first breath.

Elected progressives fail to recognize the simple truth that it is wrong to kill a child. Their ideological commitment to abortion-on-demand prevents them from even asking what an abortion is. If they were to ponder that question, they might realize that the mass destruction of innocent human life has no place in any civilized nation. Especially not ours, which is uniquely devoted to the proposition that human beings are infinitely valuable and endowed by their Creator with an unalienable right to life. Evidently the risk of coming to just such a conclusion is too great, as the value of the child’s life continues to be ignored, denied, or trivialized time after time.