As the coronavirus pandemic becomes a matter of life and death for people from Milan to New York City, the global abortion wars have intensified. Abortion, of course, is also a matter of life and death, and many abortion activists are using the pandemic to push for the elimination of abortion regulations. The UK government initially published a statement indicating that both stages of medication abortions could be done from home, before the page mysteriously disappeared from the government website. Ohio abortion clinics are fighting a directive from the attorney general to close their doors. And Planned Parenthood is declaring that they will stay open—no matter what.
While some in the medical profession battle to save lives, others continue to work tirelessly to take it.
In Poland, abortion activists are concerned that closed borders could prevent women from traveling outside the country to procure abortions that are illegal in the country. “The idea that we would have to tell a woman that because of the pandemic she won’t be able to go abroad to have an abortion as she had been planning to was horrifying,” Natalia Broniarczyk of Aborcyjny Dream Team told one media outlet. In Poland, where abortion is illegal in all cases except for fetal abnormality, rape, incest, or a threat to the mother’s health, many hospitals refuse to perform abortions, citing the convictions of the physicians. One woman, Broniarczyk noted, could not get to the Netherlands for her twenty-week abortion and had to be rerouted to the UK via Berlin. Broniarczyk’s happy endings are dead children.
The Heritage Foundation also published a good summary of how the abortion wars are unfolding in the United States, noting that the final draft of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, recently signed into law by President Donald Trump, contained Hyde Amendment protections preventing the funds from being spent on abortions. Texas has also joined Ohio in calling on abortion clinics to cease providing “medically unnecessary abortions,” with Attorney General Ken Paxton stating that abortions were required to cease along with all other “medically unnecessary surgeries and procedures,” and that anyone who violated this order would “be met with the full force of the law.” Washington and Massachusetts took the opposite approach, declaring abortion an “essential service.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has thrown its support behind states that have declared abortion an essential service, while the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists pointed out that the ACOG does not even represent its own membership considering the fact that “more than 85% of OB/GYNs do not perform abortions.” The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the Catholic Medical Association, the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, and the American College of Pediatricians joined them in stating that: “As representatives of over 30,000 physicians…[we] call for all elective abortions to be suspended in accordance with the current CDC recommendations pertaining to elective procedures and office visits.”
In Canada, abortion clinics are staying open. Despite the fact that the pandemic has halted much of the world, killing babies must go on, and I have to say that I get the feeling that this is like shaking a fist towards heaven. Churches are closed, pro-life groups must restrict their public outreach activities—but abortion clinics continue to destroy children in the womb. Perhaps this will change in the days ahead—we hope and pray it will—but it appears that this pandemic has revealed just how staunchly committed our culture is to murdering children in the womb. Even amid panic and death and disease, tiny children created in God’s image are being shredded by medical professionals who could put aside their bloody work and join those fighting to save lives.
But with society falling apart day by day, the abortionists stay busy—and say that of all the services we desperately need, from medical services to church services, the service of killing our babies is an essential one.
