"Personhood," That is, Status as a Person in the Sense that "Person" is Used in the Constitution, Should be Resolved by the Constitution

If, at this point, I turn a critical eye to the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, if I even suggest that it should not be the basket in which we place any of our eggs, let alone all of them, I do it solely because I find that the Act is a poor substitute for the proper response to the growing body of evidence that fetal children are capable of, and do experience, pain.

As an aside, so that you can measure my bona fides as a voice for life and against abortion, let me tell you about me.

• I first articulated a pro-life opinion in public as a Senior in high school at Lejeune High School, (Class of 1976) in an Advanced Biology class taught by Debra Hansen. The position I held then flowed principally from a moral conclusion regarding the act of abortion. As I moved into my adult years, I read extensively about abortion, its causes, its methods, its impact. My moral judgment became seasoned with other, equally valid, grounds of justification for the conclusion that abortion is always wrong.

• Soon, my opinion on abortion translated into action. I began speaking out against legalized abortion, including picketing and demonstrating at a local abortion facility here in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Eventually, in 1982, the rhetoric I and my brother, David Henderson, employed, resulted in a lawsuit against us for defamation by the owner of the abortion business. We prevailed. The defense of our constitutional rights of freedom of speech was accomplished by the North Carolina ACLU and by a newly founded organization, the Rutherford Institute. 

• After we prevailed, my wife and I relocated to St. Louis University so that I could attend the Law School at St. Louis University. In hindsight, no better training ground exists for a pro-life advocate that offered by an urban Catholic University well down the road in its own process of surrendering its soul in pursuit of economic survival. The law school played welcoming host to a vocal pro-abortion element, embodied by the Women's Law Caucus. How hostile could Catholic law school be to pro-life expression? I once was called to an assistant dean’s office for posting a message on the student bulletin board comparing the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights to Nazi apologists for the Holocaust. Ass. Dean Smith told me that my posting was "the most unprofessional thing he'd ever seen in the law school." Oddly, that was just days after two of my classmates were caught, in the act of copulation, on a classroom floor, by an adjunct professor arriving to teach an evening class!

• Upon graduation, for the next twenty-five years, I practiced law with nonprofit organizations that regularly and consistently included as a segment of cases a variety of opportunities for me to represent pro-life activists and anti-abortion demonstrators. In the process, I represented:

• teens seeking protection from parents trying to force them to have abortions, 
• protesters threatened with arrest for the messages on their signs, 
• pregnancy resource centers threatened with the imposition of a duty to spread the pro-abortion messages of the government. 

• If you have heard of Operation Rescue, Christian Defense Coalition, Randall Terry, Joseph Foreman, Jayne Bray, Michael Bray, Patrick Mahoney, Keith Tucci, Jeff White, Rob Schenck, Paul Schenck, Jeannie Hill, then you’ve heard of my clients or some of them.

Because the PCUCPA is so unlikely to become law, I feel at liberty to observe that the Act is little more than window dressing on a macabre set piece: the more than two score years of legalized child killing in the United States. In the face of the horror, the grinding inhumanity, of our abortion culture, can it possibly be that the best that the House of Representatives can muster is a bill doomed to die aborning -- much like the offspring of an abortion-bound woman -- before it can ever be born.

As a matter of our national history, the Civil War, a national bloodletting of nearly a half million lost lives and untold lost prosperity, was the method by which the Supreme Court's disregarding of the personhood of Africans was, ultimately, corrected.

The right answer to the ongoing holocaust of legalized abortion in America can be found in the historic response of the Congress, the States and the People to the previous erroneous decision of the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford. That historic response consisted of three proposed amendments to the Constitution, which became the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.

In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court held that blacks were not, and could never be, citizens of the United States. For that reason, courts could not entertain lawsuits by blacks seeking a declaration that, due to their sojourn in the Free States, they had acquired status as freedmen and could not, thereafter, again be subject to bondage. Civil war and nearly a half million lost lives later, the Nation repudiated the Supreme Court by ratifying the three amendments, ending slavery, guaranteeing an equal right to vote, and, under the Fourteenth Amendment, granting status as US citizens and State citizens to blacks.

Just over a century later, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court likewise concluded that children before birth were not persons in the constitutional sense. For that reason, their own interest in securing their right to life and liberty, and the interests of the States in securing their rights to life and to liberty were completely discounted by the Supreme Court as against the woman's liberty interest in choosing to have an abortion.

In the intervening period, there have been very few shots fired, but so many more lives taken than were lost in the Civil War. Then, in his second inaugural address, Lincoln suggested that the Civil War was a judgment of God on this Nation, in which "every drop of blood drawn by the lash" would have to be answered by "one drawn by the sword." Ultimately, the Confederacy surrendered to the Union, and the three Civil War Amendments were propounded to the States by Congress and ratified by a sufficient number of States. With those amendments, the Constitution expressly read directly contrary to the view of it previously asserted by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott.

Our history -- regarding the constitutional status of blacks -- suggests that there are two sound answers to the illicit Roe v. Wade decision and its progeny.

One answer could come from the Court. The Supreme Court could revisit and overturn Roe, thereby restoring to the States the power to regulate abortion or to prohibit it entirely. That has not happened, not in the more than forty years since the aberrant Roe decision.

There was a time when I, young and idealistic, thought the possibility of an internal correction by the Court could resolve the wrong of Roe. Nearly three decades have passed since I took up the practice of law in a public interest setting, with the hope that, by doing so, I would help to bring about that internal correction by the Court. In that time, I have made many trips to the Supreme Court. I have served as counsel in hundreds of cases representing those that oppose abortion through peaceful demonstrations. In a handful of instances, I represented younger women seeking protection from abortions being forced on them by parents. I also litigated against State and local criminal laws restricting free speech near abortion facilities, adopted by legislative bodies that treated abortion as though it were a holy sacrament. If the Court ever reverses course in this matter on its own, it will come as a great surprise to this no man who is no longer misguided by dreams.

Or, of course, the other answer could come from Congress, the States and the People. We could amend the Constitution in a manner that effectively overturns Roe. That effect was exactly the one gotten for African slaves by the Fourteenth Amendment: reversal of a holding of the Supreme Court that had installed that Court's wrong-headed interpretation of the language in the Constitution as the language of the Constitution. In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court said, "no," blacks are not citizens, and could never be citizens. A half million lost lives and nearly 80 billion dollars (present day value) of treasure later, the Nation bent the Supreme Court over its collective lap and gave it Fourteen spankings. The lesson lasted about as long as it took for the questions of "separate but equal" accommodations for blacks, WWII internment of Japanese Americans, and abortion to come before the Court.

So the certain way, the sure way, to end legalized abortion would be to amend the Constitution to expressly extend legal personhood status to fetal children. Article V of the Constitution sets out two methods of amending the Constitution. Congress may initiate an amendment and send it to the States for ratification. In the alternative, the States may call on Congress to call a convention for proposing amendments to the Constitution. Congress could propose an amendment to the Constitution in terms of the proposed Act.

Availability of the amendment process has not produced any change in the Constitution, however, since the decision in Roe v. Wade. How many millions more fetal Americans must be sacrificed on the altar of Supreme arrogance and ignorance before the Court's error is repudiated in a constitutional amendment ending the horror of abortion?

Missteps or Next Steps: Is this Federal Statute the Answer

I won't defer to others on the following point:

I am unapologetically anti-abortion and unashamedly pro-life. Given the ability to do so, if, like Obama, I could play emperor, I would make abortion always a prohibited criminal act. By the way, just as in history, I could do so without the prospect of women being tried for participating in the abortions of their own children.

Now, of course, criminalizing abortion can be justified from a religious, particularly Christian, perspective. "Suffer the little ones to come unto me, and forbid them not," after all, is one of the more memorable and kindly counsels that event ardent atheists recognize as a teaching of the Savior. When Mary, recently having become pregnant, visited her cousin, Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John the Baptist, Elizabeth reported to Mary that when Mary spoke, the child leapt in her womb. In Aramaic, she used the word, "blephos." That word means "child" or "little one." Still, while it suffices for people of the Christian faith that Jesus took a most solicitous view of the value of children, that perspective would not suffice to justify such a restriction in an irreligious, or religiously pluralistic society. While it constitutes a valid reason to criminalize abortion, it is not, by itself a sufficient one.

Criminalizing abortion can be justified from concern for the life and health of women that resort to abortion. Abortion is a violent physical assault on a woman. There is, after all, an atmospheric about the decision by the Republican Leadership to have held this vote on the day it chose. Kermit Gosnell, a licensed medical doctor, is in prison because he killed a woman as part of providing her with a safe legal abortion; a jury also convicted Gosnell of three separate counts of first degree murder because, after three infants were born alive during abortions, he cut their spinal cords, killing them. Abortion disrupts a natural process. Often, particularly later abortions, involve even more dangerous assaults on the woman's body to accomplish the killing of her child. There is little doubt that abortion never helps women. But in a society where genuine concern for women is portrayed as shameless chauvinism, that concern would not suffice.

The better ground on which abortion should be criminalized pertains to the civil and human rights of the fetal child. That ground is, in its essence, indistinguishable from the ground on which this Nation ultimately rejected the legality of enslaving others. Remember, the American experience with the Peculiar Institution of Slavery depended in large part on a view that blacks were not persons in the same sense that whites were. That view is the one expressed by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia. There he wrote, “I advance it as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."

In the same fashion, though by different terminology, abortion advocates have denigrated the separate and equal status of fetal humans as persons. They denigrate the personhood of fetal children in both biological and constitutional senses. As to the former, arguments for abortion that dispute the biological evidence for the fetal child's separate existence and identity have hung on long after the medical and biological evidence resolved those questions in favor of the humanness and separate existence of the fetal child.

Frankly, the persistence of that view as a matter of biology is decided in conflict with science, as testimony going back to the Senate's Hearings on S. 158, "The Human Life Bill," established. What remains then, is an argument derived from Roe v. Wade's judicial usurpations, that fetal children are not persons, at least not persons in a constitutional sense. That the Court necessarily rejected the personhood of the fetal child as part of deciding Roe v. Wade is no more dispositive there than was the Supreme Court's determination in Roe that blacks are not persons, but chattel goods.

Ultimately, as our national history showed, the one sure way to end slavery, the sure means of tattooing equality regardless of race or national origin on the skin of our governmental framework was to amend the Constitution. I have no remaining doubt that amending the Constitution is the only adequate and complete remedy to the current injustice of legalized abortion.

The House Concludes: Unborn Children Experience Pain

Why shouldn't Republicans in Congress welcome the opportunity to flush out the pro-abortion extremism of their House Democratic colleagues? That welcome effect of the debate and vote doesn't entirely explain the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (“PCUCPA”). There is, more importantly, the deeply disconcerting knowledge that all that hacking, chopping, saline boiling, heart puncturing, and collapsing of craniums that abortionists do is being inflicted on fetuses that can and do experience pain, and, in fact, may experience pain more severely than do newborns and infants.

A review of the findings of fact contained in the Act confirms that the House acted because of its conclusion that facts existed on which it could make a judgment that abortions after 20 weeks gestation. Key findings of fact by the House include:

"(1) Pain receptors (nociceptors) are present throughout the unborn child's entire body and nerves link these receptors to the brain's thalamus and subcortical plate by no later than 20 weeks after fertilization.

(2) By 8 weeks after fertilization, the unborn child reacts to touch. After 20 weeks, the unborn child reacts to stimuli that would be recognized as painful if applied to an adult human, for example, by recoiling. 

(3) In the unborn child, application of such painful stimuli is associated with significant increases in stress hormones known as the stress response. 

.... 

(11) Consequently, there is substantial medical evidence that an unborn child is capable of experiencing pain at least by 20 weeks after fertilization, if not earlier."

The House made findings as part of the Act. Those findings, in turn, find substantial support in testimony from a source of apparent significant credibility. A decade ago, Congress enacted the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Two constitutional challenges soon followed in federal courts. Those challenges, successful in trial courts, ultimately led to the Supreme Court's decision sustaining the constitutionality of the PBABA. At trial, the evidence offered supporting the PBABA included the testimony of  Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand, Regarding that testimony, the federal trial court in New York City said the following:

The Court finds that the testimony at trial and before Congress establishes that D&X is a gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized medical procedure. Dr. Anand's testimony, which went unrebutted by Plaintiffs, is credible evidence that D&X abortions subject fetuses to severe pain. Notwithstanding this evidence, some of Plaintiffs' experts testified that fetal pain does not concern them, and that some do not convey to their patients that their fetuses may undergo severe pain during a D&X.

That the Court stated its finding thus is particularly significant because, despite finding that the evidence established "severe pain" being experienced by "fetuses," the Court still concluded that the PBABA violated the liberty interests of women in access to abortion procedures. Had the Court made that finding and struck down the statute, partisans might have accredited the decision to a bias on the part of the Court regarding the statute. There, however, the Court's bias -- if one existed -- favored the liberty interest in women over the power of Congress to restrict abortions using a procedure it acknowledged caused severe pain to fetuses.

The issue of pain in the fetus is not without a skin of controversy. In "A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence," published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a lawyer and three doctors conducted a review of studies on pain in fetuses. The survey is accessible and fairly understandable. They conclude:

Because pain perception probably does not function before the third trimester, discussions of fetal pain for abortions performed before the end of the second trimester should be noncompulsory. Fetal anesthesia or analgesia should not be recommended or routinely offered for abortion because current experimental techniques provide unknown fetal benefit and may increase risks for the woman.

The survey gained some notice in media, probably because it was carried as an article in JAMA. What the authors of the article did not disclose to the editors of JAMA, however, was a record of pro-abortion activism that might reasonably be interpreted as influencing the selection of studies reviewed and reported by the article.

The National Right to Life Committee prepared a rebuttal to the study. You can find it here. A damning segment of the NRLC rebuttal connects the study's authors pro-abortion advocacy:

9. The lead author of the article, Susan J. Lee, who is now a medical student, was previously employed as a lawyer by NARAL, the pro-abortion political advocacy organization (Knight Ridder, August 24).

10. One of Lee's four co-authors, Dr. Eleanor A. Drey, is the director of the largest abortion clinic in San Francisco (San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2004, and Knight Ridder, August 24, 2005). According to Dr. Drey, the abortion facility that she runs performs about 600 abortions a year between the 20th and 23rd weeks of pregnancy (i.e., in the fifth and sixth months). (San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2004) Drey is a prominent critic of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and a self-described activist. (In a laudatory profile in the newsletter of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, September 2004, it was noted that "much of Dr. Drey's research centers on repeat and second-trimester procedures . . .," and quotes Drey as saying, "I am very lucky because I get to train residents and medical students, and I really do feel that it's a type of activism.") Drey is also on the staff of the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy (CRHRP) at the University of California, San Francisco -- a pro-abortion propaganda and training center. [] 

11. However, one reporter (Knight Ridder's Marie McCullough) did contact JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine D. DeAngelis regarding the ties of Lee and Drey. McCullough reported that DeAngelis "said she was unaware of this, and acknowledged it might create an appearance of bias that could hurt the journal's credibility. 'This is the first I've heard about it,' she said. 'We ask them to reveal any conflict of interest. I would have published' the disclosure if it had been made." (Knight Ridder, August 24, 2005) A day later, DeAngelis told USA Today that the affiliations of Drey and Lee "aren't relevant," but again said that the ties should have been disclosed. If she really thought the affiliations were not relevant, why would she say that they should have been disclosed? If a review of the same issue by doctors employed by pro-life advocacy groups had been submitted or published, would those affiliations have been ignored by journalists?  

12. Dr. David Grimes, a vice-president of Family Health International, has been relied on by CNN, the New York Times, and some other media as a purported expert to defend the paper. Dr. Grimes has made pro-abortion advocacy a central element of his career for decades. (During the time he worked for the CDC in the 1980s, his off-hours work at a local late-abortion facility sparked protests from some pro-life activists.  In 1987, a year after he left the CDC, Grimes testified that he had already performed more than 10,000 abortions, 10 to 20 percent of those after the first trimester.) In addition, Grimes was previously the chief of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the San Francisco General Hospital -- the very same institution where author Drey directs the abortion clinic.

Still, these criticisms, while revealing of researcher bias, tend toward ad hominem and do not, by themselves, resolve the questions of fetal pain.

Dr. Anand's testimony serves as a clear, highly experienced, and expert source on the question of fetal pain. In his corner, among other voices, there is the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. In a 1999 issue of BJOG, another review on fetal pain concluded as follows:

The assessment of whether or when the fetus is likely to feel pain has to be based on an evaluation of the available anatomical and physiological evidence. The physical system for nociception is present and functional by 26 weeks and it seems likely that the fetus is capable of feeling pain from this stage. The first neurones to link the cortex with the rest of the brain are monoamine pathways, and reach the cortex from about 16 weeks of gestation. Their activation could be associated with unpleasant conscious experience, even if not pain. Thalamic fibres first penetrate the subplate zone at about 17 weeks of gestation, and the cortex at 20 weeks. These anatomical and physiological considerations are important, not only because of immediate suffering, but also because of possible long term adverse effects of this early experience.

The technical summary led to the following pithy and, honestly, piteous appeal:

The eighteenth century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, wrote of animals The question is not Can they reason?, not Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?. This caused a change in attitude towards animals and their treatment that is continuing to day, such that in the UK, even frogs and fishes are required by Act of Parliament to be protected by anaesthesia from possible suffering due to invasive procedures. Why not human beings?

Indeed, why not human beings?

Perhaps not human beings because, among the feral lot of us, there are so many Obamas, so many Wasserman Schultzes, panderers to the lowest urges, who recognize no point in time when a child is too like us to accept the unrestrained brutality of abortion, when a method is too barbaric to tolerate its application as the solution to the problem. Obama's take on abortion is found in his remarks on the 38th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade:

Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women's health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I am committed to protecting this constitutional right.

Wasserman Schultz, no doubt, has an answer to the question why not protect fetal Americans from possible suffering due to abortion procedures. For Wasserman Schultz and her cohorts, the only justifiable restriction on abortion is found in the subjective judgments of abortion-bound women. Any federal statutory imposition might be taken as an expression of distrust of women's judgments about such matters, and that, in Wasserman Schultz's schema is the unpardonable sin.

Naked Political Ploy to Expose Abortion Extremism?

The House vote on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is a welcome turn of events. The House held its vote on the anniversary of the murder convictions of abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell, MD. By holding its vote on that anniversary, the House powerfully reminds us that abortion is a nasty, often unregulated, and unseemly practice.

Gosnell's little shop of horrors was a terrible place to be killed. And what a dreadful way to go, dying in the act of having your own offspring killed. By using the anniversary date of Gosnell's conviction, the connection to poor outcomes for women and children in abortion has been deliberately drawn by the House.

Of course, at some point, the allegations will be thrown about that the House vote simply served political purposes. In other words, those accusing the House Leadership of engaging in political theater will be accusing the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of an unseemly and cynical act. In that view, Boehner & Co. held the vote simply as preparation for 2016 Congressional elections. For the cynics, the vote simply presented an the opportunity to spear those Representatives – predictably Democrats – that would vote against even such a late term abortion restriction offered on such a humanitarian ground as that of the capacity of the fetus to feel the pain of her own demise.

And perhaps there are such machinations afoot; perhaps Republicans in the House are flushing out those elected Representatives so firmly committed to legalized abortion that no restriction – not as to the method of abortion, not as to the lateness of term in pregnancy at which the restriction would take effect – none whatever can be permissibly imposed on the right.

The leadership of the Democratic Party does nothing to avoid the perception that, for Democrats, there's no such thing as a permissible restriction on abortion. Just recently, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had the opportunity to identify a point in pregnancy, late in pregnancy, or a size of fetus, such as one weighing 7 pounds, at which point Democrats would support legislative restrictions on abortion. Wasserman Schultz, a good storm trooper for the abortion industry, responded:

"I can't tell you a specific date and time past which we on all – in all cases are certain that that choice shouldn't be made because that decision is very unique and individual to the woman, and should be in consultation with her conscience and her god and her doctor, that is a decision left to her."

Given the role played by the President, as leader of his party, in selecting the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, either the President shares Wasserman Schultz's extremism on abortion, believing that no restrictions may be permissibly imposed on abortion, or the President should take Ms. Wasserman Schultz to the woodshed for failing, in such an evident and public way, to state a defensible and articulate point in time, acceptable to Americans, when abortions can permissibly be proscribed.

We all know, or should know, however, that Wasserman Schultz will not be taken to the woodshed by Obama. Obama is the best friend the abortion industry has in American government. Going back to his time in the Illinois Senate, when he voted "present" on a panoply of initiatives, proposals, and ideas in the form of bills and resolutions, one instance in which the future President would be reliably voting his heart was on consideration of abortion-related legislation. 

His forte, it turns out, was to resist Illinois bills that would impose on doctors a duty to provide care to children born alive after an abortion. Notice that these were not bills that would have prohibited abortion. Nor were these bills that would have required abortion businesses to be subject to the same health and safety standards as other medical clinics. No, these were just rules that would, if adopted, tell the Dr. Gosnells of Illinois that if, following an abortion, a child was born alive, the doctor would be obliged to provide medical care to preserve the child's life. Not once, not twice, but three times, Obama took the lonely vigil stand against the imposition of such a duty by law.

The House Acts to Save a Small Number of Fetal Humans

The House of Representatives recently held a vote on the persistent and contentious abortion issue. At issue was a piece of legislation known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (“PCUCPA”) of 2015. If the bill passed by the House were to become law, it would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks gestation in almost all cases. The House finally got around to holding the vote after a stumble on the issue back at the start of the new Congress, in January.

The bill rests on the House’s factual conclusion that fetal humans – as a matter of their biology, their physiological development, not only respond to sensation, but experience sensation as pain. The medical community continues to debate the exact point in time when sensation becomes pain. The House, relying on its investigation of the science, concluded that by twenty weeks gestation, the fetal human experiences pain. Based on that conclusion, with the exception of certain pregnancies (rape, incest, life of the mother endangered), the House approved an Act that prohibits all abortions after twenty weeks gestation.

Of course, “many's the slip betwixt cup and lip.”

First, substantial doubt exists that the Senate would pass the bill.

To do so, the Republican Leadership would have to have the stomach for a legislative engagement on principles key to the base of the Republican Party base. Thus far, there is no evidence that McConnell & Co. possess the will to do so. Even if the Republican Senate Leadership considered the bill, before it could be brought for a vote, any filibuster by Democrats or the left-side Republicans would have to be overcome. Again, the fix for a filibuster is simple, as Democratic Leader Harry Reid showed when, as Senate Leader, he accomplished the destruction of the filibuster as a tool to prevent votes on judicial nominees of Barack Obama. But we can engage in infantile fantasies and pretend that McConnell might have a testicular transplant from Reid, end legislative filibusters and bring the PCUCPA to a vote, doubt still would persist that a majority of the Senate could be garnered to pass the bill.

Second, even if Congress approved the bill and sent it to the President for signature, no doubt exists that Barack Obama would veto the bill. Obama’s record of support for unrestricted abortion is clear, going back to his service in the Illinois Senate where he fought to prevent that body from adopting a law that would have imposed on doctors a duty to provide care to children born alive following a failed abortion. His now-famous blessing of Planned Parenthood while President, his admission that he views pregnancies as mistakes and that he would not want his daughters to be punished by being compelled to carry an accidental pregnancy to term, these things all make the Oval Office obstacle clear and certain.

Following House passage, the foregoing reality, that the PCUCPA has little likelihood of ever passing the Senate, and no likelihood of avoiding a presidential veto, did not keep the Chicken Little Squad of the Abortion Party on the sidelines. Rather, as predictable as ever, they sprang into full hysteria mode:

• Josh Earnest, White House Press Secretary, called House Republicans “disgraceful” and charged that the Act “would put additional burdens on survivors of rape and sexual assault.” 
• Maya Harris, Senior Policy Adviser to Hillary Clinton Campaign, mewled, “The bill puts women’s health and rights at risk, undermines the role doctors play in health care decisions, burdens survivors of sexual assault, and is not based on sound science.”
• Hillary Clinton tweeted, "When it comes to women's health, there are two kinds of experts: women and their doctors. True 40+ years ago, true today."
• Barbara Boxer grumbled, "The GOP's latest abortion ban will re-victimize survivors of rape and incest by assuming they are lying and creating unconscionable barriers to care. It offers no health exception and no help to women facing cancer, kidney failure, blood clots, or other tragic complications during their pregnancies. This bill is an insult to rape and incest survivors, to pregnant women facing a health crisis, and to women everywhere."
• Gretchen Borchelt, National Women's Law Center VP for health and reproductive rights, sniveled, "Passing an unconstitutional nationwide ban on later abortions does nothing to help women -- instead, it threatens their health and lives and interferes in their personal medical decisions. It is long past time for politicians to stop meddling with women's health -- our lives are not up for debate."
• Nancy Pelosi simpered, "This vote is just the latest measure in an unprecedented series of Republican assaults on women's health care this Congress, from restricting how women can spend private money in purchasing coverage to enabling DC employers to fire women for buying birth control."

Their hysterics belie the certainty known to each of these panic-peddlers: the PCUCPA will never become law, not while the Senate's Republican majority is so slim.

Mind you, Republicans hold a governing majority in the Senate. Yet, the Republicans continue to enforce the Senate Rule on Cloture, and the historical practice of the filibuster. They adhere to the historical practice of the filibuster despite the precedent set by Senate Democrats when they held the majority. Then, impatience over judicial holds and the pace of confirmation votes by the Senate led Senate Majority Leader to abandon the Senate's historical practice of the filibuster in the cases of consideration of executive and judicial nominations.

Now, the Republicans have the Senate, and Mitch McConnell has the Republicans. But McConnell continues obeying the tattered, torn and Harry Reid-scorned Filibuster and Cloture Rule. Even if the Senate Republican Leadership ends the filibuster and brings the Act to a vote, even if the Senate passes the House’s bill, it would not become law. Barack Obama is president, and he is, by record, the most pro-abortion president in our history.

Still, panic-peddling works has its value. It demonstrates the peddlers' commitment to a core progressive issue, and it serves the fund-raising purposes of abortion partisan groups.

The Problem of Pain: Does Anyone Care Whether Fetal Humans Experience the Pain of Their Extermination?

From time to time, a matter of gravity requires fuller treatment than Twitter allows, requires more thought than brief and witty posts permit.

I've been thinking about the recent passage by the United States House of Representatives of House Bill 1719, The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act of 2015. The Act prohibits most abortions that occur after 20 weeks gestation, and does so because of the conclusion expressed in the bill that fetal children not only experience "sensation" but feel pain. I think the case for prohibiting abortion stands without reference to the experience of pain, based on the indisputable human condition of fetal children. Yet, who can doubt that most, if not all, will find a particular cruelty in the savagery of late term abortions inflicted without consideration of the experience of pain in dying?

So I have spent some time considering HB 1719, and written what my good friend Lou called a "mega-blog."

Because this particular posting is extensive, I've broken it down into digestible portions. While the blog made sense as an assembled whole, it did require a certain level of commitment to complete it. In parts, the segments each present a set of complete considerations relevant to the whole. I hope that you find it of value.

Here are links to the separate posts. I offer them in what seems to me to be the correct rhetorical order:

The House Acts to Save a Small Number of Fetal Humans. This post introduces the disputed bill and reports on its passage. It also notes the panic peddling of abortion hawkers amongst the Democratic Party and leadership.

Naked Political Ploy to Expose Abortion Extremism? In politics, the accusation is frequently made that some bill or another was only offered cynically, for some purpose unrelated to the topic of the bill. Was the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act a naked political ploy? Or are those who refuse even the most meager measures the naked ones?

The House Concludes: Unborn Children Experience Pain Here, we get to the heart of the matter. Fetal humans are biologically alive. Medical treatment of fetal humans, and physiological research on human development shows that at least by the end of the 20th week gestation, an unborn child not only experiences sensation, but that sensation can be experienced as pain. Not that the evidence is undisputed, but the evidence is there, and just how does humanity ignore inhumanity?

Missteps or Next Steps:  Is this Federal Statute the Answer Abortion has been a prohibited, criminal act for many times longer than its present status as a blessed legal sacrament of American progressivism. With the certainty that the late term fetal human is forced to endure the pain of her own death, is the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act the answer?

"Personhood," That is, Status as a Person in the Sense that "Person" is Used in the Constitution, Should be Resolved by the Constitution Our history as a people should teach us this: the surest bulwark against government denial of human personhood is to enshrine the status of fetal humans in the Constitution by Amendment. The history shows the way.

Lesser Solution: Well-meant Window Dressing? Finally, there are real problems with the proposal, particular for those that would hold fidelity to a written, fixed in meaning, Constitution. Just because we can get away with a naked grab of power in the Legislative Branch does not justify doing so. We don't fix things by breaking things more.