November 4th is a big day. Alongside Congressional elections, it hosts the Colorado Definition of Person and Child Initiative (“Amendment 67” [1]), an initiated constitutional amendment. If approved by voters, the measure would include unborn human beings under the definition of “person” and “child” in the Colorado criminal code.
Amendment 67 was initiated by Heather Surovik, whose son, Brady, was killed whilst in the womb. Heather was in a car accident, struck by a drunk driver. According to Heather’s doctor, Brady was “days” from being born – and had already reached 8.5 lbs. I admit, when I opened the article, I thought the picture was of a sleeping baby – such was his level of development.
(Please take the time to watch this short YouTube video [2], where Heather and her mother tell their story.)
Want to make a horrific situation worse? The drunk driver was not charged with manslaughter. Why? Brady was not a person. (I recall, whenever the death toll was cited for the 1998 Omagh bombing, the unborn twins [3] were included.)
As Brady’s mother, Heather, explained: “The law says that Brady wasn’t a person.” Think of it this way: there are very few amongst us who would not know of a child born both younger, and lighter, than Brady was the day he was killed.
After waking from her post-crash operation and realising she’d lost her son, Heather could not have imagined the cruelty to which she was exposed by the abortion lobby. For example, watch this YouTube video [4] of an earlier committee hearing in the Colorado legislature; you should find the delivery by the Planned Parenthood lawyer and the We Are Women Colorado representative illuminating.
What’s particularly striking is the preposterous twisting of the English language in an attempt to avoid granting Brady personhood. The lady from We Are Women Colorado corrected her, ahem, error in using “baby” by calling Brady “a pregnancy.” You see? She cannot allow herself to call him a being; so she calls him a state of being. Stunning.
Abortion supporters will argue around the point, insinuating ulterior motives and making unfounded warnings based on their abstract interpretation of bills such as Amendment 67. But it’s pretty simple: Heather’s son was killed, and then she was told he wasn’t a person in the first place. Or am I missing something?
If ever you needed proof that the dignity of one human being is squashed “for the greater good,” here it is.
That Brady had his own DNA from a time when he was near invisible.
That Brady would have survived with ease had he been born that day.
That modern technology enabled his family to identify him as a human being in his last scan.
None of these facts change the bogus narrative that it is pro-lifers in these debates who deny science.
Now, try this thought experiment: with little notice, Heather gives birth spontaneously in that same car, and now that same car journey is made to bring Heather and Brady to hospital for post-natal care. The drunk driver rams into the car, killing 30 minutes-old Brady. Verdict?
This, dear reader, is where not only science, but the law, is politicised to the point of gross, contorted contradiction. Indeed, Heather’s mother brilliantly counters the idiotic argument that personhood is attained on taking a breath: the drunk driver took from Brady the chance to take that breath. Sadly, this argument isn’t good enough for abortion lobbyists. (Plenty of babies are killed in “partial-birth” abortions when they have, indeed, taken their first breath, so this is a nonsense definition anyway.)
It’s situtations like this that reveal the cruel, inhuman underbelly of much of the pro-choice movement.