The recent news that the number of states considered hostile to abortion has “skyrocketed” since the year 2000 has been hailed as a victory by pro-lifers across the nation. From 2000, when 13 states were considered hostile to abortion, to 2014, when 27 states merited that label, much has happened to bring about such changes.
Pro-abortion Think Progress details some of the changes in the laws that have occurred and warns abortion advocates that they are in for more of the same.
Highlighting the last four years, when Republicans landed hundreds of seats in the 2010 elections, Think Progress notes that that victory resulted in “a record-breaking number of new abortion restrictions on the state level.” The initial election of Barack Obama as president resulted in a midterm Republican response that caused states to limit abortion in increasing ways — a response to the national climate of singing the praises of elective termination.
The combination of the midterm elections and the exposure of the most gruesome abortion stories to hit the news — Kermit Gosnell’s “House of Horrors,” the late-term abortion slaughterhouse in Pennsylvania — created a perfect storm against abortion advocates, who quickly saw their dreams of abortion on demand without apology become nightmares, in which Gosnell’s dead babies lined trash bins. Even pro-choice Americans were outraged.
Police closing Gosnell’s clinic.
The abortion industry has labeled new restrictions on abortion as “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers” or TRAP laws, trying to create a connotation of restriction that somehow violates American freedom. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion think-tank, reports on how these laws are doing all sorts of things, such as forcing restrictions to provide sanitary and safe care in abortion clinics, providing counseling to abortion-minded women, and giving these women ultrasounds.
But the trend in abortion culture is showing us now that the ones truly “TRAPped” are the abortion industry workers themselves. Women and babies are finding freedom from the entrapment of abortion. Think Progress reports:
[T]he number of medical facilities that perform abortions has recently dropped to a record low. Sixty clinics were shuttered in 2014 alone, according to the right-wing group Operation Rescue — leaving the total number of clinics across the country at 551, the lowest number in more than two decades.
And then there is the United States Supreme Court, who just last June ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby’s right to religious freedom in not paying for abortifacients in its health care plans, as well as the ruling on the legality of “buffer zones” in MA, so that pro-lifers did not have to stay 35 feet away from an entrance of an abortion clinic, violating their freedom of speech.
Pro-life youth stand outside abortion center.
Think Progress concludes that these and other reasons why abortion is more restrictive than ever “illustrate the bleak reality” of what’s to come, saying:
Unfortunately for proponents of reproductive freedom, 2015 will likely bring more of the same. The most recent midterm elections ushered in a wave of Republican lawmakers, allowing the GOP to maintain control of nearly 70 chambers in states across the country. The states that have already imposed multiple abortion restrictions are expected to find ways to make those laws even worse this year, and a GOP-controlled Congress appears poised to attempt to pass a national abortion ban.
One person’s bleak assessment, however, is another’s hope for life. Law by law, state by state, abortion is being seen for what it is, a procedure where someone has to die. That’s never been a part of our American freedom; here there is a child who is denied the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately for the abortion industry, that truth is becoming more evident each day in our nation.
