What is 100% Pro-Life?

Trent Franks says he’s 100% pro-life, but he has sponsored bills with exceptions.

Take HR 36. It is the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. This same bill was introduced a few years ago without exceptions, then they were inserted. He still pushed for it among lawmakers. Does it qualify to say you’re pro-life if you are willing to compromise?

100%

It’s a funny thing about 100%, it means all and not in any portion, but complete. 100 out of 100. It doesn’t mean 3% less, because then it would be 97%. 97 of 100. That 3% looks like a small amount, though. So, does it matter?

It matters if we are talking about human lives and it matters if we are talking about 3% relative to the population of a country as large as the United Sates of America. To translate, in the most basic terms, about 35 thousand people are conceived as a result of sexual violence each year. This is only an estimate because the core violation sexual assault is so traumatizing that many people do not disclose right away. Some stay silent for many, many years.

But 97% is good, right?

The key is whether an exception is implicit or explicit. It is implied that all children less than 20 weeks old are not protected by the bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks gestation. That implication doesn’t clearly condemn those children to their deaths.

HR36 specifically designates a qualifier in order to create a loophole for abortion advocates to jump through. Abortion is banned after 20 weeks of gestational age, except if the child was conceived as a result of rape or other sexual assault, like trafficking or incest. This explicit designation of a group of people creates a segment of the population targeted for discrimination.

If 100% of all children, who have attained the gestational age of 20 weeks were protected by the ban, then the ban could be considered 100% pro-life. That 100 of 100 babies would be protected by the bill.

What of a fetal homicide law?

Is that kind of law 100% Pro-life?

So, in the case where zero children are protected and only some would be recognized, how does that concept work? Say, there is a bill that allows for the prosecution of a second victim if a perpetrator kills a pre-born child in the commission of a crime, if the child has attained the age of 20 weeks.

The prosecution or civil action doesn’t in any way protect the child. It doesn’t ban the killing of a pre-born child in any circumstance, not even in the commission of a crime. What it does is recognize that there was a second victim in the commission of an act that is already a crime. Many states have fetal homicide laws and they vary a bit by age and circumstance.

Do you see that it is implied that children less than 20 weeks would not be recognized? But what if the law said, “The perpetrator is guilty of the death of another in the commission of a crime, unless that pre-born child is of a certain ethnic decent?” Or some other specific criteria. So, of all of the children who have attained 20 weeks, except 3% who are of a specified ethnic decent are not to be defined as ‘another’ in the commission of a crime.

100% – 3% is 97% and not 100%. That seems simple, until you talk to politicians. They want to say the are 100% Pro-life, but they want to explicitly exclude a segment of the population.

The actual percentage is not the issue. The fact that a segment of the population is explicitly discriminated against is the issue.

In the days when abortion was illegal, the first step was to introduce exceptions. Do we really think we can keep that door open?