By Thurman Hayes

The videos were breathtakingly horrific. By now, many of you have seen the videos of Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, talking about late-term abortion and what amounts to infanticide. If you haven’t, I encourage you to look them up.

No matter how Tran and Northam try to spin this, their words are captured on video, and those videos provide evidence that will not go away.

The firestorm began when Tran, a Democrat from Fairfax, presented a bill to our state legislature. Under questioning from a Republican colleague, she is asked, “Under your bill, how late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion?” She replies, “So, I mean, through the third trimester. The third trimester goes all the way to 40 weeks.” The Republican then asks, “To the end of the third trimester?” Tran replies, “Yep, I don’t believe we have a limit in the bill.”

At this point, the Republican asking the questions is so floored by the brazenness that he seems somewhat dumbfounded. He asks, “Where it’s obvious that a woman is about to give birth, where she has physical signs that she is about to give birth, would that still be a point where she could request an abortion? Does your bill allow that?” To which Tran responds, “My bill would allow that, yes.”

I know it is hard to read that. It is hard for me to write it. It disturbs me to know that this is what it has come to in our country. But that was not the end of the story. The next day, Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, went on the radio, defending Delegate Tran. This is to be expected. The Democratic Party has now become so radical on the issue of abortion that they have pushed far beyond what is allowed even in ultra-liberal Western Europe, where late-term abortion is not permitted.

But then Gov. Northam took it a step further. Rather than characterize what he said, I will simply quote him directly. When asked about Tran’s bill the previous day, he said, “I can tell you exactly what would happen: The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

A discussion. A discussion about whether the baby will live or die.

This is where we have come to in America, but we should not be surprised. The groundwork was laid long ago, by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Writing in 1986, 13 years after Roe, Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the justices who ruled in favor of legalized abortion in Roe, wrote that even “the nine-month gestated, fully sentient fetus on the eve of birth” is not yet a human being.

And what rationale did Justice Stevens offer for that statement? None. Because there is none.

Deep down, people know that life begins at conception. Deep down, they know the truth of Psalm 139:13, where David says to God, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

They now hear the heartbeat and see pictures of their babies in the womb. Those babies are human beings, created in the image of God.

 

Dr. Thurman R. Hayes Jr. is senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Suffolk. Follow him on Twitter at @ThurmanHayesJr.