A Victory for the Vulnerable

It’s official:  Texas Governor Rick Perry signed into law legislation aimed to limit abortions and provide more safeguards for women and their unborn children.  After great struggle, another state has taken a stand for life of the unborn.

I am very elated by this news, as I was when I checked my e-mail on the morning of Saturday, July 13, to see a message from Students for Life America with the good news that the legislation had passed the Texas state Senate.  I had gone to bed wondering, but hopeful, that the bill would pass.

I was deeply troubled when I first heard the news three weeks ago that the bill had failed to pass before the expiration of the special legislative session after Senator Wendy Davis’s 11-hour+ filibuster in the Texas Senate and then the screaming and yelling of the pro-abortion Planned Parenthood supporters.  It was so very troubling to hear the news of the mob-like tactics the Planned Parenthood supporters used to block legislation that would limit abortions and protect innocent unborn children, and women themselves, from grisly abortion procedures, especially like those of Kermit Gosnell.

In the past year, I have solidified my pro-life stance, and this issue matters a lot to me.  Unborn babies are the most innocent human lives among us.  They deserve to be protected, which is why I’m going out to speak for them, the voiceless ones in this debate.

Since graduating from college in mid-May, I have attended three pro-life demonstrations.  Two of them have been just blocks from my home in the business district of the 900 block of south Oak Park Avenue.  It is there that Dr. Chastine has a medical office.  She is the licensed physician at an abortion clinic in Wichita, KS.  Under state law, an abortion clinic in Kansas has to be officially affiliated with a practicing physician in order to be open.  These protests in Oak Park have been held in an effort to get Dr. Chastine to drop her affiliation with the clinic so that it has to close, and babies’ lives can be saved.

Since April, Pro-Life Action League has been holding protests at Dr. Chastine’s office monthly.  At the second protest I attended, in June, pro-abortion supporters from a NARAL’s Illinois Choice Action Team came.  It was an interesting scene with both sides of the issue present there.

During the last week of May, President Obama came to the Chicago Hilton and Towers Hotel for a Democratic fundraiser, and Pro-Life Action League showed up to protest his pro-abortion stance, among some other groups protesting different issues.  It was very meaningful for me to take a visible stance against abortion and the most pro-abortion president in US history, after having taking a stance against him with my ballot in the November 2012 election.  I was actually standing about 200 feet away from the intersection of Balbo Drive and Michigan Avenue that the presidential motorcade passed through on its way to the hotel entrance, and I was holding a large sign with an enlarged image of an aborted baby.  (In regards to President Obama’s strong pro-abortion stance, it only adds to my opposition to him to hear about his tweet commending the Planned Parenthood mob that sought to block the bill in the Texas Senate after Senator Davis’s filibuster stopped.)

Participating in these demonstrations has solidified my stance even more.  So I felt within me that a lot was at stake when the bill failed to pass the Senate.  And I prayed that it would pass during the second special session, and I rooted for the pro-life supporters who flocked to Austin.

Furthermore, I can actually envision the scene of this momentous legislation:  When I attended the AMS meeting back at the beginning of January 2013, I visited the Texas State Capitol.  I was on the Senate chamber floor and in the gallery, the day before the start of the new legislative session, where the chaos broke loose at the end of the special session.  And while walking through the Capitol annex, I may have very well passed by Senator Davis’s office, or maybe even the office of a pro-life Texas lawmaker, where the pro-life college students were after the bill passed the Senate.  They were there with police protection because of the threats of the abortion supporters.

When I looked at the picture of the students, I knew I was looking at a group of saints, modern William Wilberforces, who made the effort to be in Austin to support this legislation that will protect innocent unborn children. 

 
As it says in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Actually, in one of his drafts, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “these truths [are] sacred and undeniable”.  While those words were simplified to “self-evident”, I very much like the words in the draft.  Life is a sacred gift from God, and that is wholly undeniable.  Its importance is such so that it is listed first.  I feel that all of society will unravel if we don’t make the point to protect life starting in its most vulnerable state in the womb.  That is why I am taking my stand for the life of the unborn.