This week my state senator Doug Mastriano introduced a new piece of legislation that will make it illegal to kill anyone with a heartbeat in the state of Pennsylvania.

Mastriano explained that the Supreme Court made its infamous Roe v Wade decision to legalize abortions over 40 years ago based on outdated science. The court ruled that a baby inside a mother is only a collection of tissues, not a living person. Since 1973, when the court made that decision, science and the medical community have overwhelmingly demonstrated the exact opposite. A baby with a beating heart inside her mother is a human baby, and is alive, and the heart starts beating far sooner than previously known.

He explained that the basis for his new bill is not a partisan effort to hurt women or women’s rights, but simply a standard medical practice of recognizing a heartbeat as a sign of life.

Borowicz

Stephanie Borowicz is the state representative who is sponsoring this legislation in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, while Mastriano brings it to the Senate. Both are serving their freshman terms, and both thought this issue was worth starting with. It is only in corrupt institutions that incoming freshmen are the wisest and boldest.

The new bill is straightforward. If we pronounce death when a heart stops, we ought to pronounce life when a heart starts.

Borowicz explained that when a paramedic arrives at an emergency scene, the first thing she checks is a heartbeat. If the heart is beating, the person is alive. If it is not, the person is dead. “A heartbeat is the most obvious sign of life,” she said.

In the same way, there has never been a person with two beating hearts at once. Everybody gets just one.

She told the story of the first time she was pregnant, and the joy of hearing two heartbeats on an ultrasound. The first heartbeat was her own, loud, strong, and healthy. The second was smaller and lighter. It was her son.

At that point in his life, Borowicz explained, her son had no voice, he was unable to speak. But his heartbeat was there, and that heartbeat was his voice. It was saying "I am alive, I am here, and I am a person." Her stronger and louder heartbeat was speaking to his. Together, two people were alive, neither of whom had any right to stop the heartbeat of the other.

Barnette

Kathy Barnette also spoke at the press conference. Her mother was raped at age 11, by a 20-year-old. Her mother also heard two heartbeats, and Kathy is alive today, writing books, speaking in capitol buildings, going on TV, and raising two kids of her own. Her heart is still beating. I know that because I met her. I met her mother also, whose heart is also still beating. Kathy has as much a right to live as her mother does, and we are all better off because of them.

Fact-Check It!

Kathy said she survived the most dangerous location in the world for a black person, namely, her mother's uterus. “It would be safer to put a newborn infant in an alley at midnight in Baltimore than for her to live inside her mother,” she said. "Go ahead and fact-check me!"

Indeed, the most recent numbers reported by the CDC say that roughly 400 black babies are aborted for every 1,000 live births. Those numbers are tear-jerking and appalling to everyone except those inside the abortion industry.

You see, it isn't fair to just blame black mothers for the high abortion rate. It is the predatory industry itself that builds abortion mills in black neighborhoods and targets black women in their advertising. It is an industry that promotes early childhood sex indoctrination for the purpose of making money off pregnant, scared teenagers who don't know what else to do.

Kathy pointed out that these efforts are not accidental. Planned Parenthood targets black communities on purpose, and always has. The broader purpose of the abortion mill industry, beyond making money, is to depopulate undesirable people groups, namely black Americans.

This isn't Barnette's pet conspiracy theory. You can fact check her.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The numbers come from the CDC, and the explanation comes from our oldest, and most famous Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an on-the-record statement to the New York Times. Ginsburg is probably the most qualified expert in the world to explain why the Supreme Court ruled for abortions, saying "Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

A statement like that is outrageous no matter who says it, but for 400 black babies out of every thousand it is also lethal and personal. It is devastating for the mothers, the fathers, and their community as a whole. Depression, drug use, and suicide are significantly higher among women who have had abortions, and naturally, they are higher in neighborhoods targeted by abortion mills. Namely, poor black ones.

“What the abortion industry has done to black America is worse than Jim Crow laws and all the lynch mobs of the deep south.” Barnette was sobbing as she said these things, and then defiantly looked up and said “Go ahead and find one fact I have wrong!” She is right of course, and she is radically understating it.

Abortions have killed over 18 million black people since 1973 when the Supreme Court made its ruling. That is about half the total number of black Americans in the country.  

There is a word for killing half of a racial population. It is called genocide.

The Currency of Our Lives

When paramedics arrive to a scene with no heartbeat, the EMS worker will begin chest compressions, in an effort to keep the person alive by artificially creating a heartbeat. Heartbeats are the currency of our lives.

We only have a certain number of them and nobody knows how many they will get. By this point, you have probably spent about 400 heartbeats reading this article. They are gone now. You will never get them back. That was your choice. If you had done something different for the past five minutes your heartbeats would have been spent that way.

How selfish would it be to rob someone else of theirs? How evil?

Our governor, Tom Wolf, has already said he will veto this bill when it gets to his desk. He believes that some heartbeats don’t matter, and he has the political authority to dictate which ones do. But Mastriano is an Army colonel and war historian with four master’s degrees. He knows how to fight and how to win. “You don’t get victories by capitulating. I fought for the lives of Americans for 30 years and I am not stopping until my final heartbeat.”

Let us use our limited heartbeats in the same manner.

T.S. Weidler is a pastor in central Pennsylvania.