LIFE & LIBERTY

My position on protecting the lives of preborn children is the same as Nobel Prize winner Mother Teresa, President Ronald Reagan, and Hippocrates, who is recognized as the Father of Medicine.  These respected leaders hardly advocated a radical social agenda. I fact, even Planned Parenthood, in its early days, acknowledged that abortion takes the life of a child.

I am 100% pro-life!  I have spent my 24 years as a delegate in Virginia fighting for justice for citizens, both born and unborn, despite unsupportive or unfriendly government officials who promote abortion policies that endanger women.  Women deserve better than abortion!

Human life is a gift bestowed upon us by our Creator.  The right to live and cooperate in the creation of life is a fundamental right, without which all other rights are meaningless.  The intentional taking of a human life is not a “private right.”  Our Founding Fathers fought hard to establish our Republic to protect the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.   Our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are CREATED equal.”  I truly believe that.

I find it interesting, but not surprising, that the Playboy Foundation paid for the legal research which led to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions which invalidated every state law then on the books which had restricted abortion and protected life.  While a boyfriend might help pay for a girlfriend’s abortion, the woman is left to suffer a years of regret and possible future inability to have children. Fathers also suffer regret yet have no legal right to protect their own child.

Abortion is hardly the clean, safe procedure it is purported to be.  Google “Gosnell” to learn the hard truth behind the abortion industry, which American taxpayers involuntarily subsidize through their hard earned tax dollars.  Incredibly, taxpayers give a half billion dollars a year to the largest abortion business in the nation, Planned Parenthood.  I will continue to oppose all tax funding of Planned Parenthood and abortion. Google: Center for Medical Progress to view undercover videos of abortion clinic employees pricing human organs from aborted babies. (Videos are graphic.)

As a private citizen in 1976,, I helped devise the federal Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal tax monies to pay for Medicaid abortions.  The Hyde Amendment is still federal law although modified from its original language.

Supporting legal protections for children before birth is necessary to restore respect for all human life.   Advocates of legal abortion claim that laws to restrict abortion would also make the Pill, IUD or other birth control illegal, a complete fabrication. Before the 1973 U. S. Supreme Court, when states restricted or outlawed abortion, women were never prosecuted for using the Pill, IUD or other similar birth control.

The  American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists refused to provide me any proof of their  claim that anti-abortion laws would outlaw birth control.

Misinformation, inflammatory rhetoric and public relations phrases such as, “war on women,” attempt to manipulate public opinion based on untruths.  Disingenuous scare tactics have no place in a responsible public debate on a serious matter which affects real human lives.  Women are entitled to transparency and full disclosure when it comes to the abortion procedure which has serious consequences to women and their children.  Unfortunately, no medical complications, except those which occur on the abortion table, are reported to health authorities, which paints a rosy picture of the safety of this procedure.

For the last 170 or more years, no embryology text book has disputed the fact that individual human life begins at the moment of conception (also known as fertilization).  Virginia’s public schools teach third graders that individual human life begins at the union of sperm and ovum (or egg.)

Using preborn children for medical research or experiments which terminate their lives, no matter how noble or urgent the purpose, is a violation of the God-given rights of those children. We should only do to others what we would want done to ourselves.  Allowing preborn children to be used for experiments is no less immoral than using older children or adults for research and medical experiments without their informed consent.

I chaired the diverse “Joint Stem Cell Study Commission” for three years which held hearings and evaluated research findings from proponents and opponents of embryonic stem cell research.  The bi-partisan Commission concluded that the Commonwealth of Virginia should only fund non-embryonic, adult stem cell research, which medical and scientific experts agree provide the only promising therapy with real cures. Further, use of adult stem cells do not raise the ethical objections that use of embryonic stems cells raise.

HB 85 also requires pre-natal health care practitioners to make information about umbilical cord blood banking available to every pregnant patient prior to the beginning of the patient’s third trimester of pregnancy or at the patient’s first visit, whichever is later.