In 1973, the US Supreme Court made an infamous ruling, one that was immediately condemned, and since has only increased in controversy. It was the Roe vs Wade decision, where the court took the place of the legislature, and created new law, and expanded to the point of creation, a new right of privacy, as the justification to rule that children in the first trimester could be killed inside the womb, and children in the second trimester pretty much also. The only outright restriction was in the third trimester, which still allowed abortion to "save the life or health of the mother."
Almost immediately, an entire industry was created, principally by Planned Parenthood, to carry out industrial abortion. Even the third trimester abortion restrictions have been challenged, and some states now have laws that give the mother the right to kill her baby all the way up until birth. One morally warped governor of Virginia went so far as to say there "should be a conversation" about whether a child born alive, but with birth defects, should be killed.
It's hard to get an exact count on how many abortions in America have taken place since 1973. Most believe it to be around 62.5 million.
With but a few exceptions, the split of view on abortion has trended as a Republican versus Democrat concept. Most Republicans want abortion outlawed, at least in the second and third trimesters, and most Democrats want it retained. Some Democrats object now to abortion in the third trimester, and views on abortion, especially the late-term abortion procedure, have hardened to where a majority of people think the late term procedure is barbaric.
Since 1973, medical science weighed into the controversy in an unintended manner. Advances in technology to save babies has reached the point now where most pre-term births in the second trimester result in a happy, healthy baby, able to enjoy a normal life. That fact alone, has given people cause to reconsider the situation. The notion of viability entered the discussion back in 1973, and truth is viability has changed as medical science has advanced.
This political divide should not surprise anyone. Democrats have been on the wrong side of history throughout nearly their entire existence.
To abortion, and all the other sordid examples, one can add another sorry chapter to Democrat policy. As adults, there is not a more important role than in fostering the next generation of people. So, any organized policy that deliberately harms children is about as evil as it gets. Any society that abuses its children is on a path of self-destruction.
Even child abuse in the heat of an emotional moment can be prosecuted as a crime. Imagine how much worse it is then, when adults get together and carefully craft policies for political benefit, knowing how many children will suffer as a result.
For months since taking office, the Biden administration sought to prevent the media from entering detention facilities that had become overrun by illegal immigrants. We all knew why. The Dems knew the extent of the human suffering of their politically motivated policies. They wanted to hide it from the people. Yet, finally, in late March, we got to see the situation for ourselves. Facilities designed to house a few hundred were forced to house several thousand. The situation was so acute, plans were made to pay border state hotels to become ad-hoc detention facilities.
But, housing children in crowded conditions is just the start of the abuse. It gets much worse.
Parents in South America, turn their children over to the Mexican drug cartels, who as side projects, engage in human trafficking. These criminals rake in fees in the thousands per child to run them across Mexico to the US border, then cross the border near a US Border Control facility, point the children in the direction of the American Border Patrol, and let them be captured. Those who are, and are now crammed in tight quarters are the lucky ones.
Many others died during the trip. Many girls who survived the trip were gang raped. This isn't a theory. The proof is extensive. Add those so abused and dead to the millions killed through abortion, and one starts to gain wisdom on just how extensive Democrat policies have become in abusing children. Those killed and abused in human trafficking have paid one hell of a price just so the Dems can create a new generation of reliable voters to replace those Americans who have wised up to the evil nature of a party they once supported.
The abuse goes beyond abortion and human trafficking.
Public school systems in areas dominated by Democrat machine politics have become a failed institution of political corruption. Teachers unions now openly conspire with local Democrat governments to trade political favors for largess in the form of union school contracts. The situation is now so corrupt, that teachers in many counties are being paid their full salaries to stay at home and conduct a few online classes of dubious value. An entire generation of American children are seeing their fleeting chance for a quality education evaporate because teachers unions and Democrat politicians really don't care about the needs of children.
Remember that the next time some leftist tries to engage in the morality lectures they are so fond of making.
In fairness, cheap labor is another influence in the human trafficking. Cheap labor from South America, especially illegal aliens, gives individuals and businesses a lot of leverage to abuse workers, knowing that any complaints could easily result in a strategic complaint to federal officials, resulting in deportation back to an uncertain future in said worker's home country. This is the selfish reason why some Republicans are soft on border security, choosing instead to take large donations from the US Chamber of Commerce, an organization with deep ties to promoting illegal immigration for nothing more than cheap labor.
Again, hell of a price these children have to pay just so some rich families can save a few dollars on the people they hire to cut their grass and clean their homes! Hell of a price also that skilled workers in America pay so that cheap labor from overseas can take valuable jobs now hired on the cheap to people desperate enough to take anything.
Still, the illegal immigration issue, just like the abortion issue, trends along a Republican versus Democratic line. Most Republicans want border security, and an effective end to human trafficking into the United States. Most Democrats seem very confused. Those who continue to tee up morality arguments that immigration is a human right, spend a lot of time trying to cover up and turn a blind eye to the human suffering their rancid policies create.
The truth is that the United States cannot solve all the world's problems. Also, the cause of poverty south of the Rio Grande has many causes, most of which are rooted in corrupt governments that mired their people in generations of civil war, as one potentate tried to replace the last one, all bent upon personal wealth and power, with little care about what kind of society they built with their time in office.
Mexico itself is a particularly tragic situation, a nation of natural resources and climate, likely superior to those in the United States, and yet, one cannot find a more stark disparity in economic development across one thin river. Sadly, the conditions in Mexico make that nation a comparative paradise to life in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador -- the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America.
One can only imagine the human misery that generations of corrupt governments have created, to prompt parents to turn their children over to drug cartels, knowing that their daughters will likely be raped, and possibly raped and killed. Still, that desperation must be based upon a hope. That hope is a better life in America. What's cruel therefore?
When a political party parleys an open invitation to illegally cross a domestic border, knowing ahead of time the riches for drug cartels, and the history of human misery those cartels met out, then who exactly is being cruel? When you see film of a little girl crying, who's surrounded by strange children in a US Border Control detention facility, one wonders what she is crying about. There are a lot of possible causes: missing her parents, being alone and scared, recollections of a terrible experience at the hands of her cartel traffickers? Take your pick. All are likely candidates.
If America were to finish construction of the border fence, eliminate the orchestrated abuse of the well-intentioned asylum laws, and make it clear that illegal entry is not a pathway to live in America, then the cartels would lose billions of dollars in trafficking fees, and a lot of children might grow up with their parents in Central America, vice gang raped and left to die in some Mexican or southwestern American desert.
But, that would also mean the Dems losing a new generation of vote ranched sheep, who look like people, and certain businesses and wealthy individual Americans suddenly having to pay going wages for people to perform their labor. Personally, that sounds like a win-win situation. Unfortunately, for too many American interests, it seems like way too much to ask. So, each time a Democrat is elected President, the border invitations are sent out, and the mass media plays their unremitting siren's call of pretentious and phony moralizing.
In truth, it's nothing more than organized child abuse, and sadly, Democrat policies have a lot of layers when it comes to abusing children for political power, both American children as well as those born in other nations.
-- Ken Stallings
This column is copyrighted under provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and all rights are reserved. Please do not re-transmit, host, or download these columns without my written permission.