(ZENIT News / Michigan, 18.12.2023) Michigan’s Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, signed the new law that eliminates the restrictions to abortion, allowing it even when the child could survive after its birth. The law is known as the “Law of Extreme Abortion.” It also deregulates the safety measures in abortion clinics, subject up to now to strict health and safety rules.
It’s important to recall that voters of Michigan, California and Vermont approved in the Spring elections a rule that establishes reproductive freedom as a Constitutional right, prohibiting that abortion be inapplicable in all cases, which the U.S. Supreme Court already abrogated in the Roe v. Wade case.
The rule signed by the Governor invalidates Michigan’s 1931 State Law, which prohibited abortion without exceptions, such as cases of rape or incest. This measure impedes the revocation of the “right” to abortion.
Barb Listing, President of Michigan’s Right to Life, highlighted the importance of keeping the basic health and safety rules in abortion clinics, which Michigan voters approved by 95%, as neglecting them creates ethical harms and dangers for women’s and children’s health and safety, including the unborn. The new law enables a child to be aborted while in its mother’s womb at any time and without paying attention to the medical or psychological reason that might affect the mother.
The Director of SBA Pro-Life State Affairs, Sue Liebel, said that it’s the law with the least compassion in the State’s history: it facilitates the atrocious death of a baby about to be born and without taking care of the traumatic experience for the mother.
In some States of the Union, there is a marked tendency to de-regulate and do away with safety measures in the practice of abortion, when avoiding risks for the mother’s health has been a basic argument of abortionists. The lowering of safety for mothers manifests the irrational defense of abortion, a step backwards in the protection of the most vulnerable and an attack on fundamental ethical values.
Michigan’s change of policy on abortion impacts the national debate on the right to be born, as an attack on the beginnings of life and human dignity.
Barb Listing opened a chink of hope with the call to union and defense of life: if parents fight for the rights to keep the consent of progenitors to not leave mothers alone, in face of a pregnancy, the pressure on pregnant women will decrease to take recourse to abortion and will increase babies’ possibility of life.
