Republican governor of Ohio signs bill banning abortions when babies feel pain

I'm Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this study
I’m Scheming Unborn Baby, and my sneaky plan worked perfectly! Excellent!

Wow, I’m so shocked and surprised by this – John Kasich is barely a Republican.

Life News reports:

Today, Governor John Kasich signed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (Sub. S.B. 127), landmark legislation which would ban late-term abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.  And, citing concerns it would be overturned in court, Kasich vetoed a ban on all abortions after the heart of an unborn baby begins to beat.

“I agree with Ohio Right to Life and other leading, pro-life advocates that SB 127 (a 20-week ban) is the best, most legally sound and sustainable approach to protecting the sanctity of human life,” Kasich said in a statement.

Because the heartbeat-based abortion ban will not likely survive a legal challenge in court, pro-life legislators approved the 20-week abortion ban with the hope of saving as many babies as possible under Roe v. Wade.

Why is this “20-week” legislation important? It’s important because when the national news media cover this law, they are going to put the focus where it belongs – on the unborn baby:

“On behalf of Ohio Right to Life and our statewide members, we sincerely thank Governor Kasich for his unwavering support for the unborn and our pro-life mission. By signing S.B. 127, the 20-week ban, Governor Kasich will save hundreds of unborn lives each year and he positioned the state of Ohio to directly challenge Roe v. Wade,” it told LifeNews. “The 20-week ban was nationally designed to be the vehicle to end abortion in America. It challenges the current national abortion standard and properly moves the legal needle from viability to the baby’s ability to feel pain.”

The incremental approach is realistic, and effective. In no way is the pro-life movement required to settle for this victory, either. They will take down the pro-abortion status quo one piece at a time if they have to.

So what about that premise – unborn babies feeling pain at 20 weeks. Is it really true?

Yes – this is another case where the science is all on the side of the Team Pro-Life:

One leading expert in the field of fetal pain, Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand at the University of Tennessee, stated in his expert report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, “It is my opinion that the human fetus possesses the ability to experience pain from 20 weeks of gestation, if not earlier, and the pain perceived by a fetus is possibly more intense than that perceived by term newborns or older children.”

“The neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies,” explains Steven Calvin, M.D., perinatologist, chair of the Program in Human Rights Medicine, University of Minnesota, where he teaches obstetrics.

Indeed, that’s why the line is set at 20 weeks, and now we can ask the Democrats why they want to hurt babies. That’s what this is really about. I have lived a long time on this planet, and I have never, ever hurt a baby. It’s not hard, you just avoid getting drunk, and chose relationships based on reason instead of feelings. Then you will never be in a position where you are tempted to hurt a baby to preserve your own happiness.

Here’s what a baby is like at 20 weeks:

You are 20 weeks pregnant. (fetal age 18 weeks)

  • Baby now weighs about 11 ounces and is roughly 7 inches long.
  • Baby is 17 cm long crown to rump, and weighs about 310 grams.
  • The baby can hear and recognize the mother’s voice.
  • The mother will probably start feeling the first fetal movements.
  • The toenails and fingernails are growing.
  • The growth of hair on the rest of the body has started.
  • The skin is getting thicker.
  • The heart can now be heard with a stethoscope.

Your baby may react to loud sounds. Baby can actually hear noises outside of the womb. Familiar voices, music, and sounds that baby becomes accustomed to during their development stages often are calming after birth. This is an important time for sensory development since nerve cells serving each of the senses; taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch are now developing into their specialized area of the brain.

Your baby now weighs about 11 ounces and at roughly 7 inches long they are filling up more and more of the womb. Though still small and fragile, the baby is growing rapidly and could possibly survive if born at this stage.

I understand why Democrats would vote to allow abortions on unborn children at this age. The abortionists make money off of these procedures, and they make more money off of the sale of organs, sometimes cut from babies who are still alive. Some of that money makes it’s way back to the Democrats in the form of political contributions. It’s similar to the way that slavers made money off of slaves… except they didn’t torture the slaves and cut the organs out of them to sell. I guess someone standing in a slave plantation might have said to a slaver “you can’t do that, they can feel pain”. And Republicans are standing outside abortion clinics and saying “you can’t do that, they can feel pain”. But in both cases, the slavers and the abortionists are making money from their barbarism. So it doesn’t make a difference to them whether they unborn can feel pain. The important thing to them is that they are making money. And the money being made by abortionists makes its way into the coffers of Democrat politicians running for re-election. This is working as designed, according to Democrats.

Just for completeness, I must mention that even the radically leftist New York Times admits that unborn children are viable at 22 weeks. Democrats are not in favor of limits on abortion at any number of weeks. And the later the better, as far as they’re concerned – more developed babies have parts that can be sold for big money.

William Lane Craig and atheist Daniel Dennett discuss cosmology and fine-tuning

British Spitfire and German Messerschmitt Me 109 locked in a dogfight
British Spitfire and German Messerschmitt Bf 109 locked in a dogfight

Here is audio of a very interesting exchange between William Lane Craig and leading atheist Daniel Dennett.

This audio records a part of the Greer-Heard debate in 2007, between prominent atheist Daniel Dennett and lame theistic evolutionist Alister McGrath. Craig was one of the respondents, and this was the best part of the event. It is a little bit advanced, but I have found that if you listen to things like this over and over with your friends and family, and then try to explain it to non-Christians, you’ll get it.

By the way, this is mostly original material from Craig, dated 2007, and he delivers the speech perfectly, so it’s entertaining to listen to.

Craig presents three arguments for a Creator and Designer of the universe:

  • the contingency argument
  • the kalam cosmological argument
  • the teleological argument

He also discusses Dennett’s published responses to these arguments, and that’s what I want to focus on, since most of you are already familiar with Craig’s philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

Dennett’s response to Craig’s paper

Here is my snarky paraphrase of Dennett’s reponse: (this is very snarky, because Dennett was just awful)

  • Craig’s three arguments are bulletproof, the premises are plausible, and grounded by the best cutting edge science we know today.
  • I cannot find anything wrong with his arguments right now, but maybe later when I go home it will come to me what’s wrong with them.
  • But atheism is true even if all the evidence is against it today. I know it’s true by my blind faith.
  • The world is so mysterious, and all the science of today will be overturned tomorrow so that atheism will be rational again. I have blind faith that this new evidence will be discovered any minute.
  • Just because the cause of the beginning of time is eternal and the cause of the beginning of space is non-physical, the cause doesn’t have to be God.
  • “Maybe the cause of the universe is the idea of an apple, or the square root of 7”. (HE LITERALLY SAID THAT!)
  • The principle of triangulation might have brought the entire physical universe into being out of nothing.
  • I don’t understand anything about non-physical causation, even though I cannot even speak meaningful sentences unless I have a non-physical mind that is causing my body to emit the meaningful sentences in a non-determined manner.
  • Alexander Vilenkin is much smarter than Craig and if he were here he would beat him up good with phantom arguments.
  • Alan Guth is much smarter than Craig and if he were here he would beat him up good with phantom arguments.
  • This science stuff is so complicated to me – so Craig can’t be right about it even though he’s published about it and debated it all with the best atheists on the planet.
  • If God is outside of time, then this is just deism, not theism. (This part is correct, but Craig believes that God enters into time at the moment of creation – so that it is not a deistic God)
  • If deism is true, then I can still be an atheist, because a Creator and Designer of the universe is compatible with atheism.
  • I’m pretty sure that Craig doesn’t have any good arguments that can argue for Christianity – certainly not an historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus based on minimal facts, that he’s defended against the most prominent historians on the planet in public debates and in prestigous books and research journals.

This is a very careful treatment of the arguments that Dr. Craig goes over briefly during his debates. Recommended.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

Teacher fired for stating pro-life views that “triggered” pro-abortion student

Women are more liberal on abortion than men
Women are more liberal on abortion than men

Wow, this is like my worst nightmare of what a liberal co-worker could do to me, if I ever expressed my views directly.

Canada’s national newspaper, the National Post, reports:

A teacher at a posh private school in British Columbia was fired last month after making an innocuous comment about abortion to his Grade 12 law class.

[…]The 44-year-old teacher, who has asked that he not be identified to protect what’s left of his career, was teaching “the criminal law unit, a lesson on vice, ethics, morality and the law” to his small class in the Vancouver-area school in late November.“I was working my way through examples of how some people’s sense of personal ethics was more liberal than the letter of the law,” he said in an email.

For example, he told them, many people might roll through a stop sign on a deserted country road, deeming it morally acceptable, even if unlawful.

In other words, he said, in a pluralistic democracy, there’s often “a difference between people’s private morality and the law.

“I find abortion to be wrong,” he said, as another illustration of this gap, “but the law is often different from our personal opinions.”

That was it, the teacher said. “It was just a quick exemplar, nothing more. And we moved on.”

A little later, the class had a five-minute break, and when it resumed, several students didn’t return, among them a popular young woman who had gone to an administrator to complain that what the teacher said had “triggered” her such that she felt “unsafe” and that, in any case, he had no right to an opinion on the subject of abortion because he was a man.

[…]What happened to the teacher over the ensuing few days sounds like something out of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, where people were subjected to what were known as ideological struggle sessions, forced to “confess” to various imagined sins before large crowds, and roundly denounced.

Immediately after the student complained to the administrator, the teenager came, with a teacher at her side as support, to confront him in a public area of the school.

She pressed for an apology, but the teacher resisted, because, he said, it would set a dangerous precedent for a teacher to be reamed out in the presence of a colleague.

“When I didn’t show contrition,” he said, “I was summoned upstairs and grilled by two administrators who told me my job was on the line.”

Now panicking — he has a family to support and had just recently returned to teaching after several years in business with a relative — he apologized profusely and promised to apologize the next day to the offended student.

Instead, the school had an administrator take over the class for a day, whereupon, he was told, they would all discuss what went wrong in his absence. He would be invited back to “hear the grievances and offer an apology. It was clear I must do this successfully or I would be terminated.”

He repeatedly asked what he’d done wrong or if there was an allegation of misconduct.

“The answer I got back was that I was recognized as an outstanding teacher, but student ‘safety’ was the school’s primary concern.”

With the discussion now scheduled for the following day, the teacher, near to melting down with apprehension and disbelief, went to a walk-in clinic and asked for tranquillizers.

The discussion was postponed another day, and after “white-knuckling” it through his other classes, it came time for the law class.

It was exactly the horror show he’d imagined: His boss sat among a crowd of students, ran through a list of what had gone wrong and “what I needed to do to change.” While most students appeared to be on his side, the offended girl was still furious.

He apologized specifically to her, but then made what was apparently a fatal error: He said he liked her, that she was a bright and engaging student, and said he’d told her father just that at a recent parent-teacher night.

She stormed out of the class in tears, and he was again castigated by his superiors, this time for having been “too personal” in his apologia.

On Nov. 30, he showed up at the school, was retrieved by an administrator and taken to the “head” of school, the private school equivalent of a principal.

He was told he “could no longer continue in the classroom,” and was offered a short-term medical disability top-up for employment insurance.

He was then escorted down the hall and off the premises.

In a more recent news article in the National Post, the school is named:

Fraser Academy, the expensive Vancouver private school where last month a teacher was fired after making allegedly “triggering” remarks to a Grade 12 law class, has put its staff under a gag order.

I guess I have to react to this personally. I have seen things like this happen before, not just in the education system, nor even in the public sector, but in the private sector. It has caused me to have a very firm and convinced prejudice against people on the secular left, namely, that they are so intolerant and bigoted that they literally cannot be approached openly. It’s a short step from getting someone fired for disagreeing with you (i.e. – destroying their career and starving their family) to further acts of depravity, like false accusations, fake hate crimes, death threats, vandalism, violence and even domestic terrorism. And the secular left is doing a lot of that lately. You have to be a special kind of narcissistic sociopath to get someone fired just for disagreeing with you – and that’s what the liberal education system is turning out in droves.

Where do these kinds of students come from? Well, it turns out that the education system is chock full of teachers and administrators who are intent on undermining judgments against immorality.

Consider the architect of Ontario’s sex education curriculum:

Ben Levin, the man who “appeared to have it all,” was today sentenced to three years in prison for three child pornography offences.

[…]The once-tenured professor at Ontario’s Institute for Studies in Education had a “hidden, dark side” in a “depraved on-line world” as a “deviant mentor” who made “insidious attempts to normalize the sexual exploitation of children,” McArthur noted in her 23-page reasons for sentence.

[…]A member of Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team, Levin was deputy minister of education in 2009 when he and then-minister of education Wynne developed the “equity and inclusive education strategy,” part of which was the 2010 radical sex-ed curriculum shelved by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty after parental backlash. The 2015 sex-ed curriculum is virtually the same as the 2010 version.

[…]Levin himself claimed in a 2010 interview: “I was the deputy minister of education. In that role, I was the chief civil servant. I was responsible for the operation of the Ministry of Education and everything that they do; I was brought in to implement the new education policy.”

[…]Levin pled guilty on March 3, 2015, to three of an original seven child pornography related charges.

Many people go into the education system to normalize immoral behavior, and naturally they teach students to feel offended at any sort of judging of their immorality. The promotion of non-judgmentalism flows from people who do immoral things and who don’t want to feel bad about it. Many people who become teachers and administrators do so with the goal of causing students to become offended by those who make moral judgments. 50 years ago, you could expect teachers and administrators to side with the teacher who expressed the pro-life views. But today, many teachers and administrators would side with the offended student. I suspect that they share her hatred of disagreement and disapproval because they are hiding something in their own private lives, and they just hate anyone who makes moral judgments.

I really hope that this story of the pro-life student and the fired teacher will help you to learn to predict the rage you will be subject to should you ever disagree with secular leftists in the slightest way. For your own safety, you need to assume that teachers and administrators are immoral psychopaths, even if not all of them are. And this is especially true of public schools. Never state your views where secular leftists can overhear. And understand that this is going to keep going – the next generation is going to be even less sane and less moral, not to mention less employable. It is going to keep going until government money that subsidizes (and normalizes) reckless immoral liberal lifestyles runs out.