I’m old enough to remember when the pro-abortion crowd wanted abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Nowadays, the abortion lobby wants to replace “rare” with “plentiful,” even in states that have placed restrictions on abortion in a post-Roe world.
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One of the biggest debates surrounding the abortion issue is when life begins and when that life is worth saving. Two recent stories in the mainstream media highlight that debate and provide some interesting opportunities for discussion.
The first story I want to draw your attention to was from the New York Times. Last week, the Old Gray Lady published a feature about authorities using forensic genetic genealogy to determine the mothers of abandoned babies who died. Some of these women are facing murder charges decades after leaving their babies to die.
Law enforcement agencies began using forensic genetic genealogy around 2019. These vast public databases of DNA that genealogy services have made available gave police avenues to find out who the mothers of some abandoned babies were. To date, the technique has allowed authorities to find nearly 40 women nationwide. In some of the cases, the women claimed that they thought their babies were stillborn.
“In most of the cases reviewed by The Times, women who were matched by DNA to a dead newborn were charged with murder,” the report notes. “Some were sentenced to decades in prison, while others got lighter sentences, often after pleading guilty to lesser charges like manslaughter. A handful of the women avoided prison time altogether.”
The obvious question that a pro-lifer could ask after reading this story is: What magically happened to make these lives worth seeking justice for? Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad authorities are pursuing accountability, but why charge a mother with murder or manslaughter after abandoning her baby decades ago while encouraging women to “shout their abortions” when they end their babies’ lives in the womb?
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Related: Is the Abortion Pill as ‘Safe’ as the Left Claims?
The other story comes from Texas. Granted, the Lone Star State is red and pro-life, but this curious case raises an interesting question.
In Parker County, Justin Banta, a 38-year-old IT employee with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is facing murder charges for spiking his girlfriend’s drink with abortion pills after she told him that she wanted to carry the baby to full term.
The Dallas Morning News reports:
In mid-October, Justin Banta met with the woman — then six weeks pregnant — at a coffee shop in Burleson, where she told him she suspected he had “secretly slipped abortion-inducing pills” into her drink without her knowledge or consent, according to a Parker County sheriff’s office news release and an arrest-warrant affidavit obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
The woman miscarried days later, the affidavit says.
Banta’s girlfriend knew that her baby was healthy and wanted to carry it to term, but Banta encouraged her to take the abortion pills. She refused, and security cameras at the coffee shop caught him putting pills into her drink. She experienced “extreme fatigue and heavy bleeding,” went to the ER, and miscarried shortly after the meeting.
Additionally, Banta faces charges of tampering with data because he remotely deleted data from his phone after he surrendered it to the police for evidence. Interestingly enough, the police still say that he has “fully cooperated” with the investigation.
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What’s interesting about this case is that Banta now faces murder charges — and rightly so — for doing something that a woman could do on her own and go unnoticed or even be celebrated for making a “choice” and taking control of her “reproductive freedom.” Of course, it all comes down to consent, but if it’s murder in Banta’s case, it shouldn’t be “reproductive justice” when a woman kills her baby with the same pills.
When does a life have value? When is a baby’s life worth seeking justice for? As a pro-lifer, I know, but I don’t think the pro-life and pro-abortion camps will ever arrive at the same answer to those questions. And that’s sad.
When I write about the pro-life cause, I often quote a song lyric that sticks with me: “The fight for life is always real.” It’s one of the many fights in which conservatives are engaging, and you can help us in these fights by becoming a PJ Media VIP.
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