Vermont’s ill-conceived Proposal 5 would amend the state’s Constitution to protect the “right” to terminate a pregnancy up until birth. There are numerous faults with this bizarre effort, not least of which is the determined effort to treat viable children who can live outside their mother’s wombs as tissue to be inhumanely dismembered and tortured.

If half of what is performed to surgically terminate a late-term human pregnancy were inflicted on an industrial cow or a domestic pet, the liberal world would be inflamed with indignation. Instead, the pro-Prop 5 testimony on January 26th largely consisted of haughty indignation that included:

• repeated Cider-House-Rules-style stories of the horrors of pre-Roe abortions, irrelevant to the protections of Vermont women today.
• arguments that conception does not result in human life, ignoring whether a viable child constitutes one.
• denigrations of those who object as opponents of freedoms of women: one woman snidely objected to “old white men” being entitled to opinions at all. (The Constitution says all voices are equal: but why do so many old white women so desperately wish to hack viable children into screaming deaths on a stainless-steel table?)
• redundant invocations of the horrors of eugenics practices. This is particularly hypocritical, as the same Progressives who embrace abortion (including Margaret Sanger) were those who inflicted eugenics practices on Vermonters: now they seek to permit much more horrific things to be done to children weeks after they can survive independently from the womb. As an Abenaki, I find this deeply offensive, just as I resent the ongoing exploitation of that history by white elitist Progressives seeking to condemn poor native Vermonters as white supremacists.
• appeals on behalf of victimized women, always ignoring the failure of Vermont’s laws to criminalize the reckless or deliberate murder of a child in utero, no matter how close to term. Patricia Blair’s two babies were killed six months into her pregnancy by a wasted driver; other women lose children to miscarriages after brutal beatings. Vermont refuses to legally protect the children of these pregnant mothers at any point before delivery!
• numerous claims that Roe was under attack, and so Vermont must go beyond the already extremist H. 57 and safeguard the continued slaughter of viable children in the same Constitution which was the first in the world to ban slavery. The irony here is as rich as most of the out-of-touch flatlanders who dared to force this disgraceful embarrassment down Vermonters’ throats. Roe is indeed under attack –  Proposal 5 far exceeds anything Roe ever imagined!

Abortion advocates have always been extreme hypocrites. The Roe Supreme Court observed of abortion proponents that they claim that adoption of the ‘quickening’ distinction through received common law and state statutes tacitly recognizes the greater health hazards inherent in late abortion and impliedly repudiates the theory that life begins at conception.

Now those same proponents claim an absolute right even to those unsafe and barbaric late-term abortions, by invoking paper-tiger threats to early abortions as rationale. This is as bizarre as a Biden press conference.

Perhaps the Legislature will weigh the legal and moral issues that elude histrionic supporters of this amendment. After all, some 80% of Americans, and nearly as many Vermonters, oppose the late-term abortions being celebrated by advocates of Prop 5. But also, Roe v Wade specifically recognized that the Constitution afforded rights not only to women for their privacy but to nascent humans for their very lives, at the point of viability:

The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. She carries an embryo and, later, a fetus, if one accepts the medical definitions of the developing young in the human uterus…. Each grows in substantiality as the woman approaches term and, at a point during pregnancy, each becomes ‘compelling.’ With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability.

Science now recognizes viability at 24 weeks, though many of us in Vermont know children running around born earlier than that. By 30 weeks’ gestation, the prospects for healthy survival outside of the womb are extremely good — unless a mentally ill, drug dependent, or very young mother (those statistically more likely to delay abortion until late-term) decides to reduce those odds to zero. Then other adults, including many traumatized women nurses (studies show that almost all who participate in abortions — even the most ardent of abortion rights supporters — suffer emotional trauma of varying degrees), are compelled to participate in the “procedures”; suppress their hearing when gurgling, crying babies survive; then discard the corpses as salable tissue to pharmaceutical companies who pick up routinely in Burlington, for freshness.

Roe v. Wade defined a compelling interest to protect life beginning at viability — scientifically accepted at 24 weeks or earlier; Vermont is protecting abortions even beyond 40 weeks. This is not just a technicality — this is Prop 5, perhaps the most extreme abortion law in the world. Proponents haughtily snivel about religious moral impositions, while they evade accountability for the immoral world they propose. Secular France is battling over whether to expand its abortion laws – from a decades-long limit of 12 weeks, to a more “progressive” 14 weeks.

Vermont’s frenzied abortion-lovers freak out at Prop 5 opponents as extremists, yet almost no country on the planet has more abortion-hungry legislation than Proposal 5 and H. 57. Vermont likes to lead the world – some proponents employed exactly that justification to enact the perverse Proposal 5. But there are sensible reasons why the rest of the world has not gone that far, and will never tread this dehumanizing path.

Abortions are performed at increasingly earlier stages of pregnancy, and are more widely available than ever in history – especially in Vermont. There is thus less excuse than ever to subject mothers to the heightened risks of late-term abortions; doctors and nurses to the horrors of performing them; conscious and bewildered humans to the terror of enduring them. Alarming numbers of Down’s Syndrome babies are now aborted based on in utero testing – the Left will claim that is a woman’s right: it is a page out of the eugenics playbook nonetheless.

The Roe Court emphasized that the Constitution “….is made for people of fundamentally differing views.” Vermont’s ultra-progressive Legislature seeks to alter the first Constitution in the western world to ban slavery to be more expansive for BIPOCs, while narrowing protections for the unborn to negate their lives and relegate them to the legal status of the unviable. These children, and the majority of Vermonters who oppose this travesty, are once again being marginalized by extremists who exploit others’ victimization to subjugate and control them. These are the same forces as the eugenicists of our ugly past – the real racists. Apparently they never went away, and are alive and well today.

Proposal 5 will likely be enacted despite all these atrocities, by a small minority who are abusing public trust. While inflation soars and COVID rages, Vermont’s Progressive Mafiosa throttle Vermonters with patently regressive climate initiatives, critical race theory, unsubstantiated assumptions of white supremacy, attacks on Vermonters’ gun rights and hunting traditions, unjust stereotyping of good police officers, and transgender therapies and drugs that make children infertile – administered behind parents’ backs!

Proposal 5 seeks to craft a Constitution that is made for people of only one view, a view which includes callously slaughtering babies after viability – and boasting about it as a freedom. The United States Supreme Court will have to step in, to protect viable children from the villainous savagery of today’s Green Mountain State.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2022. All rights reserved.