Sometimes confirmation of the pro-life position comes from an unlikely source.
A clip from Real Time With Bill Maher has been circulating on social media, owing to Maher’s stark honesty that abortion kills a human being. First, Piers Morgan rightly points out that most European nations – 47 of 50, to be precise – have abortion laws that are less liberal than the United States (where the lowest common denominator for policy is currently set by radically pro-abortion states like California and New York).
Maher is not pro-life and makes no bones about it. Still, he is often willing to call out some of the more absurd contortions of the Left. Here’s his blunt response to Morgan’s “pro-choice” stance:
Where we agree with Maher: Since it is a scientific fact that a human being’s life begins at conception, drawing the line anywhere after that is never completely satisfactory. Roe v. Wade leveled existing protections for unborn children to the ground, and for 50 years we’ve been trying to rebuild from scratch. With a multi-billion-dollar industry devoted to abortion, it has not been easy to do that, to say the least. It involves meeting people where they are and building from there.
At one point Maher states, “I don’t understand the 15-week thing…I can respect the absolutist position.”
We are, of course, happy to add clarity where we can.
In the days immediately following the Dobbs decision, The Wall Street Journal found that 72% of voters agreed with limiting abortion no later than 15 weeks. Three quarters of women, seven in 10 Independents and six in 10 Democrats agreed.
By the time Harvard-Harris polled the issue in November 2023, that total had barely budged. Large national polls have continued to show that Americans overwhelmingly support limits on abortion; NPR found that 67% would limit abortion to the first three months of pregnancy at most.
Our colleagues at Charlotte Lozier Institute designed a beautiful website, The Voyage of Life, to illustrate human development from fertilization to birth typically about nine months later. Five scientists, including two medical doctors, all women, wrote and reviewed the content.
At 15 weeks, science tells us:
These are all traits of humans. No one trait, by itself, is what makes a person human. However, each one is an empirically observable fact – something every person without an agenda should be able to agree on.
At 15 weeks, surgeons have operated on babies right in the womb. “Fetal surgery has proven successful in treating twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, spina bifida, congenital heart defects,” and more, our Lozier colleagues note. During these surgeries, the standard of care is to provide anesthesia and pain medication individually to the baby, not only to the mother.
If the medical world recognizes unborn babies as patients, shouldn’t they be protected in our laws? If science shows unborn babies feel excruciating pain and react just the way one would expect a person to react to pain, with stress, grimacing and sometimes tears, shouldn’t we stop aborting them?
For Democrats, party orthodoxy forbids consideration of any limits whatsoever on abortion. That’s why, when confronted, they must avoid answering at all costs – even if it results in robotic talking-points delivery such as this:
Candidates who embraced a 15-week minimum standard as a contrast to Democratic extremism in the 2022 midterm elections for Congress won their races. Making the case for protecting babies when they feel pain isn’t hard. Sadly, all too often, it has been left untried – to the detriment of our politics.
The majority of American voters believe that unborn babies should be protected from being aborted when they can feel pain by as early as 15 weeks. As pro-life Americans, we cannot allow this killing of unborn babies to continue.
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