New York’s new partial birth abortion law, which legalizes killing babies up until moments before birth, also has an impact on the children abortion advocates are always claiming they support: the wanted children.
The New York Reproductive Health Act (or RHA) legalizes abortion from week one of a pregnancy through birth for all women in New York state, allowing doctors to perform abortions up to mere minutes before a child is born and well after 24 weeks, the recognized point of viability outside the womb. Such a procedure is allowed if there is an “absence of fetal viability” or the abortion is deemed necessary to protect the mother’s “health,” which includes emotional and psychological health,
But lawmakers recognized that allowing for partial-birth abortion, and in a separate law criminalizing the murder of an unborn — but wanted — baby created a conflict in the state code. That same measure also defines a baby past the 24th week of gestation as a “person” — another hurdle for the RHA.
If a pregnant woman is harmed and her baby is killed, New York, until January 23rd, defined that death as a homicide and prescribed appropriate punishments in line with the state’s existing murder laws. But the new law specifically rewrites the New York penal code, Pajamas Media and the Albany Times Union report, to remove those prescriptions.
“Homicide means conduct which causes the death of a person [or an unborn child with which a female has been pregnant for more than twenty-four weeks] under circumstances constituting murder, manslaughter in the first degree, manslaughter in the second degree, orcriminally negligent homicide[, abortion in the first degree or self-abortion in the first degree].”
As PJ Media puts it, the new law “explicitly amends the penal code to remove protections for wanted babies who die in domestic violence or other kinds of assault.”
“By completely gutting abortion from New York’s criminal law, the RHA removes the state’s only prosecutorial tool for holding violent abusers accountable for the death of wanted unborn children,” a Times Union opinion writer reports. “Studies show that domestic violence escalates during pregnancy. New York’s version of a fetal homicide law lies within the abortion provisions of its penal law, which the RHA repeals.”
That’s particularly shocking given that feminism has made the prevention of abuse and violence a hallmark of the movement in the past year, stressing that women who are harassed, abused, and who are victims of violent partner attacks must be encouraged to speak up and pursue justice.
The new Reproductive Health Act actively rips away one very specific — and very powerful — tool from women who are victims of domestic violence that extracts an incredible price: the life of their unborn child.
As the Times Union opinionist puts it: “How could any feminist strip away the right of a woman to prosecute a violent partner for killing her wanted fetus? Depriving women of the opportunity to punish violent partners for killing their wanted unborn children is anti-woman.”
The answer is easy: the bill sacrifices children at the altar of feminism’s highest sacrament, abortion.
The bill also removes protections for babies born alive following an attempted abortion procedure, repealing a portion of the New York health code that required any facility that performs abortions to have medical care personnel on hand or on call to provide care to babies greater than 20 weeks gestation who survive abortion procedures. And it explicitly prohibits the state from enacting a law to prevent the abortion of disabled babies.
Clarification: A previous version of this article described New York’s Reproductive Health Act as allowing abortion up until birth “for nearly any excuse.” It has been clarified to specify that abortion is allowed up until birth when the abortion is deemed “necessary to protect the patient’s life or health,” which can include emotional and psychological health.