Pro-life viewers of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night likely walked away from the speech perplexed, offended, and deeply saddened – and probably all at the same time.
The 68-minute oration covered a wide range of issues, including references to the shrinking Snickers Bar. But for our purposes, we want to attempt to separate fiction from the fact concerning what was said about abortion and broader issues related to the sanctity of human life.
President Biden said last evening, “The Alabama Supreme Court shut down IVF treatments across the state, unleashed by the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.”
The Alabama Supreme Court did no such thing. Instead, the decision didn’t make IVF illegal. It made destroying embryos illegal. Several clinics chose to suspend services after the ruling, but they weren’t forced to do so. It would seem they closed because they were concerned they’d be held liable if embryos were destroyed during the treatments.
Additionally, the charge that Roe’s reversal led to Alabama protecting embryos was also not accurate.
“There are states that have banned embryo-destructive research for a long time [under] Roe and before Dobbs,” O. Carter Snead of The University of Notre Dame law school told the Washington Examiner. “There was never a suggestion that there was a constitutional right to IVF.”
President Biden’s statement, “Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America,” belies several realities.
First, we don’t know of any pro-lifers bragging about anything. Celebrating, yes, but not boastfully or pompously. Second, we pro-lifers believe in the power of both women and men – which is why we’ve been striving to protect the preborn for decades. Half of all abortions kill future women – erasing forever their contributions to the world. We also believe there’s no one stronger or more beautiful than a mother leaning and living into her calling.
The president also pledged, “If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again!”
In this instance, Biden is presumably referring to the “Women’s Health Protection Act” – a dishonestly named bill that doesn’t protect women’s health at all. Rather, it would further endanger women’s health (both mother and child) by expanding abortion to every state and render any type of parental notification law illegal.
In other words, President Biden wouldn’t restore Roe – he’d expand it and make abortion even more available and prevalent than when Roe was law of the land.
Adding to the heartbreaking address was a chamber full of pro-abortion representatives cheering for a culture of death and championing calls for its legal expansion. It brings to mind the awful stories of child sacrifice in the ancient world.
We pray for God’s mercy – and for the protection of all innocent preborn life.
Image from Getty.
