Kansas lawmaker: Abortion on par with Holocaust
TOPEKA, Kan. (Christian Examiner) – The Holocaust has nothing on abortion, says a freshman Republican lawmaker who spoke about a Kansas bill that would prohibit "dismemberment abortion" procedures.
"If that child – and we were talking, just let's say, back 70 years – we're talking about that child being Jewish and should it be aborted by being ripped out like that, I think we'd have a different conversation here," said Republican Representative Dick Jones of Topeka.
He was speaking to the Federal and State Affairs Committee of the Kansas House of Representatives.
After the hearing he clarified that abortion-rights supporters are akin to totalitarian leaders who during the 1930s and '40s killed thousands of people deemed to be "a drain" on state resources, according to an Associated Press article picked up by newspapers across the nation.
More than 6 million Jews and 5 million other individuals deemed unfit for German society were exterminated by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. By comparison, more than 57 million unborn children have been aborted since U.S. law permitted abortions in 1973 -- with more than a million killed last year alone, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The specific technique that would be banned in Kansas is called dilation and evacuation, a method commonly used in second-trimester abortions, defined as weeks 14-26 of a pregnancy.
"The moment of conception, when the finger of life is touched to that fetus, to that egg, it becomes a human being with all the inherent rights," Jones told AP. "If we look at this in any other fashion, we're then saying that it's all right to kill quadriplegics because they're a burden on society."
Abortion-rights advocate Julie Burkhart of the Trust Women Foundation testified that the dilation and evacuation procedure is the safest option for the mother when terminating a pregnancy and that "making part of health care illegal and inaccessible is not serving women at all."
Others charged the ban would result in more children being born into poverty, implying the motivation for the ban was to ensure a cheap labor force.
Senate Bill No. 95 specifically makes it unlawful in Kansas to knowingly dismember "a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time" using an instrument to "slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child's body in order to cut or rip it off."
However, it makes an exception for a medical condition that would cause the mother's "death or in substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function" -- but not for a "claim or diagnosis that the woman will engage in conduct" that would result in her own harm.
The National Right to Life Committee has said the bill could be used to model legislation in other states as a step toward the removal of abortion as an option for women with unwanted pregnancies.