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California Bill Proves Human Life Amendment Needed
By Doug Patton
October 14, 2002

A few blocks from my home, a group of volunteers work to get a newly acquired building in shape for occupancy by a non-profit organization called "A Woman's Touch Pregnancy Center."

There are many such centers across the country. What makes this one special is that it is located next to the office of one of America's most notorious abortionists, Leroy Carhart.

Carhart, you will recall became the poster boy for the abortion movement when he successfully sued the State of Nebraska for passing a ban on his most profitable procedure, partial birth abortion.

Imagine having a medical practice wherein you become wealthy by pulling fully-formed, normally developed babies from their mothers' wombs, stabbing them in the back of the neck with a sharp instrument and then vacuuming their brains from their skulls while their helpless little bodies writhe and struggle in your hands. Of course, abortionists like to call this gruesome practice "Intact Dilation and Extraction," or "D & X," but reasonable people know what it is. It is, as former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynahan, D-New York (certainly no pro-life conservative) once dubbed it, "the closest thing we have to infanticide."

The recent passage by the California Assembly of SB 1301, euphemistically referred to by its sponsors as the "Reproductive Privacy Act," speaks volumes about the mentality of the radical pro-abortion minority in this country. This statute states that if the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision is ever overturned, abortion will remain legal in California. To the surprise of no one, Gov. Gray Davis dutifully did the bidding of California feminists and signed it into law.

The bill's chief sponsor, State Senator Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, warned ominously, "With an anti-choice President, an anti-choice Congress, and the Supreme Court one vote away from unraveling Roe v. Wade, it is now more important than ever that we protect the reproductive rights of Californians."

What planet is she living on?

The Senate side of that "anti-choice" Congress to which she refers is controlled by Democrats so rabidly pro-abortion that they refuse to even consider a judicial nominee who does not bow at the altar of feminism and uphold its sacrament of abortion on demand. And even if control of the Senate reverts to the GOP, does anyone but the most severely paranoid pro-abort believe that the Senate Judiciary Committee will approve the nomination of activist pro-life judges who will immediately seek to undo thirty years of reproductive case law?

Then there is the Supreme Court, which would not even uphold a ban on partial birth abortion two years ago and is therefore hardly teetering on the brink of reversing Roe. In fact, Reagan appointee Sandra Day O'Connor, who once stated that medical advances had placed Roe "on a collision course with itself," changed her mind and cast the deciding vote in 2000 in the case of Carhart vs. Stenberg. This makes it a very large leap indeed to believe that the high court is "one vote away from unraveling Roe v. Wade."

SB 1301 proves that if Roe were overturned tomorrow, it will establish nothing but a patchwork of fifty different laws in fifty different states. Innocent unborn human life will not be protected.

The reversal of Roe is not enough. A Human Life Amendment to the Constitution is needed, stating that life begins at conception and deserves protection from that point on.

If a reversal of Roe is a daunting task, then the true solution is indeed one for the ages: a challenge to be placed alongside the abolition of slavery and voting rights for women.

There are only two ways to pass a Constitutional amendment: through a vote of two-thirds of the Congress and three-fourths of the State Legislatures or at a second Constitutional Convention. I hope to see it happen in my lifetime without another Civil War.