INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — For the fourth year in a row, an Indiana lawmaker has proposed a bill that would declare that life begins at conception and would consequently outlaw abortion in the state.
“The general assembly finds that human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm,” House Bill 1089, filed by Rep. Curt Nisly, R-Goshen, reads in part. “Indiana asserts a compelling state interest in protecting human physical life from the moment that human physical life begins.”
It notes that the legislature derives its power to issue laws outlawing abortion from the Tenth Amendment, which outlines, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
The bill also points to the Declaration of Independence, which declared that men are endowed by their Creator with the right to life.
It nixes language in existing state statutes pertaining to the allowance and regulation of abortion in Indiana, and proclaims that any federal laws that fail to protect the right to life are “null, void and unenforceable in Indiana.”
“The courts of the United States have no jurisdiction to interfere with Indiana’s interest in protecting human physical life from the moment that human physical life begins,” it also reads. “Indiana’s interest in protecting innocent human physical life from the moment of conception shall be enforced by Indiana government officials and agencies, regardless of any court decision to the contrary.”
Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky has already condemned the measure, stating that it would “decimate abortion rights in Indiana and criminalize abortion, allowing abortion providers and people seeking abortion to be charged with murder.”
“This bill is not only unacceptable and immoral, it is illegal,” claimed Chief Legal Counsel Hannah Brass Greer in a statement.
“These unprecedented actions are by far the most outlandish we have witnessed against Hoosiers and their health,” she remarked. “We have a message to the out-of-touch politicians who have spent their careers attacking our rights, our bodies and our health care: We decide.”
H.B. 1089 has been referred to the House Committee on Public Policy for Consideration. For the past three years, committee chair Ben Smaltz, a Republican who identifies as pro-life, has not brought the proposal up for a hearing due to his disagreement with the approach.
The Journal Gazette reported in 2017 that Smaltz “couldn’t get past the fact that there were no exemptions for abortion in the case of rape, incest and saving the mother’s life.”
“If my wife is on the table and the government comes in and says ‘no,’ there’s going to be a fight,” he told the outlet.
As previously reported, a number of doctors and nurses have spoken out against the assertion that abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother, as if a situation arises, the doctor will simply perform a Cesarean section and deliver the baby early. There is no need to kill the child in the process, they state.
Several women who have been raped, such as Jennifer Christie-Brierly, have also been vocal in their stance that abortion is not the answer to the trauma as the woman “does not need violence on top of violence, tragedy on top of tragedy.”
As previously reported, in early America, Christians were staunchly against abortion, seeing the shedding of innocent blood (Proverbs 6:16-17) and the discontinuance of a life created and given by God as murder.
In his 1869 sermon entitled “Ante-Natal Infanticide,” E. Frank Howe, the pastor of the Congregational Church of Terre Haute, Indiana, said, “[I]t makes no matter that the victim cannot stretch out its hands in defense. … It matters not that it … can utter no cry of pain or reproach. The sacred gift of human life is taken — is deliberately taken, and this constitutes the crime, and that crime is murder.”
He lamented that “men and women place their own ease and pleasure above God’s law” and that “public opinion is so corrupted there is no voice of reproach,” forthrightly declaring, “Put what face upon it the community will, disguise it under whatever name you please, you can make no more or less of it than simple murder.”
Ecclesiastes 11:5 states, “As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.”
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