She was at her desk, surrounded by beaming women. There was flashing and the sound of camera shutters; the governor bent over and signed a document. She nodded as the women broke out into laughter and applause. “Thank you,” she said. She handed out the pens she used to sign the document as souvenirs so that the triumphant spectators could remember and relish the moment.
The momentous event was Governor Healy’s signing of the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, which eliminated one of the state’s last remaining abortion laws. Previously, abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy was restricted to a handful of instances, including to “preserve the life of the patient” or the patient’s “physical or mental health,” the likelihood that the child would not survive long outside the womb, or a “lethal fetal anomaly.” Now, abortion is legal until birth.
The name of the law is a lie. This legislation does not prioritize patients. It permits the killing of full-term babies that can survive outside the womb (a preemie born at 21 weeks survived in Iowa last year). The previous Massachusetts regime already permitted the destruction of preborn children who might not survive; it permitted the killing of those that were sick; it allowed the termination of those who were disabled. This law is something else. It ensures that women can have healthy babies murdered any time before delivery.
“Wondering what (and who) your baby will look like?” the pregnancy website “What To Expect” tells us. “If you had a baby cam at 24 weeks pregnant, you’d almost be able to tell by now. That beautiful face, though still tiny, is almost fully formed, complete with eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair.” The little girl or boy can recognize music, is about 11.5 inches long, and is accumulating baby fat. Even “pro-choice” people rarely deny that at this stage, we are talking about a baby.
That is what made the cackling in Healey’s office so sinister. Those women were not celebrating “prioritizing the patient.” They are celebrating a procedure that is undeniably infanticide; a procedure that involves injecting babies with heart-stopping poison; grim stillbirths; crushed skulls; severed limbs. They are celebrating hard tools tearing through soft baby flesh; tiny heads separated from bodies; small hands opening and closing as small bodies are targeted with violence. As one nurse recalled after a late-term abortion: “That baby boy had the most perfect angelic face I have ever seen.”
“I grabbed something, crushed it a little, removed it, and threw it onto a cloth,” one abortionist remembered. “I look, and I see a hand – quite a large hand. The child was 3, perhaps 4 months old. I had no tape to measure it… As I pull out the mess, thinking it will be bone fragments I lay it on the cloth, I look, and I see a human heart, contracting and expanding and beating, beating, beating. I thought I would go mad. I can see that the heartbeat is slowing, ever more slowly, and more slowly still, until it finally stops completely.”
“Nobody could’ve seen what I had seen with my very own eyes, and be more convinced than I was — I had killed a human being.” That child was the last of 48,000 babies he aborted.
The arguments of ignorant pro-choice people died in Healey’s office on Monday, because the killing the crowd was celebrating was of a kind that is beyond nuance. In the early stages of pregnancy pro-choice people can pretend that we are not talking about babies; they can pretend that babies are not people; they can claim the babies being suctioned into bloody slurry do not feel pain. The women gathered in Healey’s office cannot pretend any of those things.
They have planted their bloody flag on a pile of corpses that are recognizable even to a fanatic as children; we can see their faces. We can see that they look like us, only more innocent. They know this, and they laughed as Healey signed their death warrant.
“There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul,” Mervyn Peake wrote in 1956. “Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and its cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice.”
