With the nearly non-stop passage of pro-life legislation on the state level across the U.S. since 2018 began, many people justifiably ask whether that legislation is symbolic, merely intended to educate the public due to the certainty that it will be overturned by the courts, or whether it is actually effective in saving babies from abortion. One answer can be found in the case of Arkansas, which recently won an important pro-life victory when the Supreme Court refused the request of abortion activists to consider overturning one of their recent restrictions on abortion. As a result, NBC News published a news article scarcely a week later, describing the impact:
Planned Parenthood has been canceling abortion appointments for women in Arkansas this week, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a state law restricting the procedure.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively let Arkansas law restricting medication abortions— in which women are given pills that cause a process similar to a miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy — go back into effect, making Arkansas the only state to restrict use of the abortion pills.
“The law that we were trying to get blocked went into effect immediately, and the immediate results were we had to turn away from the clinic people who were scheduled to take the pill,” Dr. Stephanie Ho, a physician at Planned Parenthood Great Plains in Fayetteville, Arkansas, told NBC News on Wednesday.
Attorneys for the three abortion clinics in the state — Planned Parenthood runs two, in Fayetteville and Little Rock, and Family Planning Services, also in Little Rock — asked a federal district court judge on Wednesday to block the law again. But in the meantime, women in Arkansas do not have access to the abortion pills. Ho didn’t know how many appointments had been canceled, but she said the clinics were still trying on Wednesday to get in touch with women who had already scheduled appointments.
“It’s incredibly disheartening to call a patient and say you qualified for this last week but your government says that’s a decision you no longer get to make,” Ho said. The two Planned Parenthood clinics, including Ho’s, and Family Planning Services had offered medication abortions. Now the only abortion procedure available in the state are surgical abortions offered by Family Planning Services.
In other words, pro-life laws have the ability to save lives. Abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood push abortion as a cheap, easy alternative to actually carrying a child to term, and they function like a business with a product to sell. With abortion pills, their task becomes even easier and feticide even simpler. But when pro-life legislators work to place restrictions on the often unaccountable Wild West of the abortion industry, people have the opportunity to think twice, and lives are saved as a result.
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